This story is the first in a four-part series on the life and death of Hays resident Karen Schumacher, who died at the hands of her husband in 2022.
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SEE RELATED STORY: Hays man who killed wife sentenced to 10 years in prison
By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
On March 21, 2022, an ambulance was called to 324 W. 24th St. in Hays.
Karen Schumacher was transported to Hays Medical Center, where further examination showed significant trauma to her head, face and chest, upper extremities, lower ribs, and upper abdomen.
Jeremiah, Karen's only son, said she was bruised from head to toe.
Karen died at 9:03 on the morning of March 22. She was 60 years old, a mother, grandmother, sister and friend.
Her husband, Jay Schumacher, was arrested on a charge of first-degree murder.
The violence that ended in Karen's death in 2022 started decades earlier, according to Karen's friends and family and letters Karen wrote and hid from her husband throughout the family's home.
Karen was caught in a cycle of control, cruelty and violence that was at first hidden and is far too common for other women.
Karen's family and friends have given a voice to Karen's story in hopes of eliciting change in a system that they say betrayed Karen. They hope telling her story will prevent what happened to her from happening to someone else.
Karen and Jay met at a party. Karen became pregnant with her only child, Jeremiah, who was born shortly after they were married. A fairy tale romance, it was not. Cracks in the marriage appeared soon after Jeremiah was born.
Jay was a trucker. He drove at night and would sleep in the basement during the day.
"When I came over, she had to silence me," Sue Rohr, Karen's sister, said. "'Shh. If I wake up Jay, he's going to go off on me.' We had to talk outside or go for a drive or a walk because she said even walking on the floor, he would come up and go off on her. I didn't know what 'go off' meant."
Sue said she did not understand until many years later that “go off on her” meant a beating.
Four months after Jeremiah was born, Karen met her sister, Sue, for a visit, and Karen had a black eye. Sue asked what had happened, and Karen said she was changing Jeremiah’s diaper, and he kicked her.
"A little baby kick wouldn't give her a black eye. Jay was in the kitchen. I went over and said, 'If I ever see any marks on my sister, I will report you to the police,'" Sue said.
"Unbeknownst to me," Sue said, "that was when he started punching her in the head." Sue added Jay would hit Karen beneath the hairline so the bruises wouldn't show.
Sue said this pattern of head trauma would become evident years later, according to a neurologist hired by Karen's family.
Sue saw no more black eyes. Karen kept the violence in the household silent, hidden. Sue thought her sister was safe.
Scarlett Deutscher waited tables with Karen at a local family-owned Mexican restaurant, and the two women struck up a friendship.
Deutscher described the crew at the restaurant as one big family.
“Back then, Karen was lots of fun. She was always laughing. She was always singing, always very positive. You would not know anything was ever wrong with her. She was very happy, always late, but that was Karen, late for everything,” Deutscher giggled.
Deutscher and Karen shared their lives between service and tabs, both of them suffering in similar ways. Deutscher was also struggling with an abusive partner.
"We talked about stuff that had happened in the past that she kind of let on about. I know she didn't share too much because everyone knew Jay," Deutscher said. "She didn't want to say too much because of what could happen to her or how he would take it out on her and Jeremiah."
But there were subtle signs.
Deutscher said Karen came to work one day with broken glasses that she taped back together.
"If she would wear a shorter shirt, you might see something," Deutscher said of Karen's bruises. "She always played it off as 'I ran into something.' Or 'I'm a klutz.'"
In a recent interview with the Hays Post, Deutscher said she now regrets not doing more to help her friend then and the years prior to her death.
“We didn’t talk about it too much because I was going through things back then, too,” Deutscher said, “a boyfriend and being through domestic abuse through him. I was working through my own turmoil.”
“Knowing how I was then and how I am now. I was so weak back then,” Deutscher began to cry.
"I got away, and after a good year to year and a half of listening to 'I won't do this anymore. I love you' and sending flowers that were supposed to make everything better."
“I was just a low place in my life, that I just felt like I couldn’t do anything without him,” she said.
Deutscher escaped her abuser. She has been happily married to her current husband for 17 years.
Deutscher said it took courage and support from her family to leave.
"It took just knowing that I could do better. Knowing that I really didn't need this person in my life anymore," she said. "I couldn't let my kids see me like that anymore, knowing he could possibly do more."
Beyond the bruises
As Deutscher struggled to leave her abuser, Jay was closing his grasp tighter around Karen. There were other signs that all was not well in the Schumacher household.
Sue and Deutscher said Jay was in control of the family finances.
"Most Friday nights, she would tell me she was supposed to buy groceries, and 'Jay gave me 20 bucks to buy groceries for the week,'" Deutscher said.
"He controlled everything. He controlled the car she drove. I don't think she even had access to their finances, to be honest," she said.
Karen sometimes worked multiple jobs, including waitressing and cleaning houses. Sue said Jay forced her to give him all of her tips.
Jeremiah recalled his mother cashing in quarters to buy enough gasoline to get to work.
He allowed her money for diapers and pet food. Sue said Jay wouldn't even pay for essentials like bras for Karen.
'I figured it was normal'
Jeremiah, who is now 44, described the violence he witnessed in the house. As a young boy, he thought he was the source of his father's anger and violence.
He described his parents' relationship as "hot and cold."
“They were either great, or they weren’t. There was really no in-between,” Jeremiah said. “Dad would come in with a smile on his face, and five minutes later, he would be screaming at the top of his lungs, throwing things, up in people’s faces. No good. We all lived on eggshells.”
Jeremiah said he saw his father hit his mother many times, but no one intervened. He described an incident when the family was living in Victoria. Jeremiah was about 7.
"We had a cop that lived across the street," Jeremiah said. "Any time that dad would get on his big tirades, I would open my window and scream at the top of my lungs, hoping that someone would come help.
"One night, that cop shows up in his underwear and a white wife beater and beats on the door, and I thought we were finally getting some help. Dad answered the door, and he said, 'Jay, get this over in a hurry. I've got to get some sleep. I've got to work in the morning.'"
“So after that, I figured it was normal,” he said. “I thought that’s what everybody went through.”
The beatings didn't stop with his mother.
"I was terrified of him, always. Absolutely terrified," Jeremiah said of his father. "I got beat profusely because the toilet lid fell down when I went to go to the bathroom as a child when he was sleeping. It was so terrifying that I would take water bottles and milk jugs to pee in my room because I was too afraid to leave."
Jeremiah tried to avoid his father and spent as much time away from the house as possible.
“But if I got in any trouble, if I forgot to do a chore or anything like that, I would be grounded for two weeks or a month or two, or God knows how long,” he said, “And I would have to hide in my room the entire time.”
Jeremiah said the length of the grounding often depended on how long it took the bruises to heal.
“I couldn’t come out. If I did, I had to be church mouse quiet because otherwise, that other shoe could fall at any minute,” he said.
Then there were the words he used as fists.
"I was told that I was worthless, that I should have been aborted, that he would kill me and make one just like me," he said.
“As a little kid, seeing the thing that my dad did, it scared the hell out of me,” he said.
Jeremiah didn't know until much later in his adulthood what Jay was telling his mother—something so awful she chose not to leave her husband in the face of so much violence and cruelty.
Jeremiah moved out of his parents' house when he was 19. He thought the violence for his mother stopped. He had always been told he was the reason his father was violent.
Gut him like a deer
As an adult, Jeremiah begged his mother to leave.
"'He's not going to do anything here,'" Jeremiah said to his mother, pleading with her to come live with him. "'Fuck, Mom, why didn't you leave when I was a kid and get me out of this and get us out of this?'"
“She looked at me and said, ‘Your dad told me if I ever tried to leave, he would gut you like a deer in front of me just so I could watch you die before he killed me.’”
Jeremiah said he thought he knew what his father was capable of, but that statement shook him.
“I was pretty taken aback,” Jeremiah said. “I knew my dad never liked me for the most part unless I was useful for something, but I didn’t know he would kill me or that was a thing he would say to her until that day.”
What mattered was that Karen believed it.
Although Karen tried to leave many times and even separated from Jay in preparation for a divorce, Deutscher said she believed the threat against Jeremiah ultimately kept Karen in the relationship.
“Her worry was money and that he would come after her and Jeremiah,” Deutscher said.
"As moms, we want to protect our children and grandkids, the people who we love the most," said Deutscher, a mother and grandmother herself. "That was a worry. What he might do is why she actually didn't go through with the divorce."
Editor's note: Scarlett Deutscher is an employee of Eagle Media, the parent company of the Hays Post.