“I was begging for him to stop and screaming. I don’t know how I made it through. I swear, God allowed me to leave my body for a moment to survive. He told me if I wasn’t quiet, he was going to kill me. So I went quiet, and then he started pouring it in my left eye. And then, he was done.”

Heather’s husband immediately began to concoct a lie that would spare him a date with justice. He told Heather to pretend that she had an accident with oven cleaner, telling her “You know you did this to yourself, right?” after taking her to the hospital.

At the hospital, Heather was told that the chemical her husband poured on her face had essentially “melted” her eyelids off. She was airlifted to a level 1 trauma center in Kansas City and put into the ICU burn unit.

“They kept asking what happened and I knew they didn’t believe what I was telling them,” she explained to PEOPLE. “The nurses, everyone kept trying to get me to explain the real story but I just thought, ‘What if he kills the kids and then himself?’ I couldn’t risk that.”

After undergoing three facial surgeries in a week, Heather was sent home.

“After that, he never physically abused me again, and he seemed to like that I was dependent on him,” she recalled. “I didn’t have eyesight for seven months in either eye and my right eye had to be surgically closed. It had scarred over — my retina is intact but I don’t have a cornea to see out of. So they have it covered so it stays protected.”

Then, six months after Heather was sent home from the hospital, the doorbell rang.

“It was May 24, 2023,” she said. “The doorbell rang, and he went outside and didn’t come back … I could hear him yelling at the cops and he made a comment that someone from my command was walking up. Two people from my command said, ‘You can come with us voluntarily or involuntarily, but we need to question you.’”

“They had found out through my work email,” she added. “I had written a draft email to my mother a couple months before it happened … saying things have gotten really bad, I’m scared something’s going to happen to me or to the children. Before I could send the email he turned off the Internet — but it was saved in my work email, which was the only thing he couldn’t access.”

While Heather’s children were placed with a foster family, Heather went to Walter Reed for a psychiatric evaluation.

“I was taken, I was blind, I didn’t know what was going on with my kids. I basically had Stockholm syndrome at the time,” she says.