A month before she was shot, Katrina Brownlee had a premonition. In a dream, the 22-year-old saw her former fiancé—a law enforcement officer who had abused her for years—try to kill her, but she survived. She had experienced such premonitions since childhood and later came to view them as guidance from God. As she headed to the house they had shared, a voice in her head pleaded with her not to go back.
It was a freezing January morning in 1993. Brownlee, five months pregnant, took a cab with her two-year-old daughter through the snow to her ex’s house on Long Island, New York. Her seven-year-old daughter was at a playdate. Brownlee had left her fiancé for good a few weeks earlier and had been hiding with her daughters in a motel. But recently, they had spoken on the phone. He seemed to accept that their relationship was over and agreed to let her collect her belongings.
“I just wanted to get back the little I had,” she says. “I had no money. I was homeless, pregnant, with two young children. Just in a bad place.”
He let her into the house. She put her daughter down in a bedroom and went into the master bedroom to gather her clothes. The house looked just as she’d left it: beige carpet, white walls, the bed made. But when she opened her drawers, they were empty. Her heart began to race. Had her ex tricked her into coming?
She turned into the living room and found him pointing a gun at her stomach. He fired three times. Brownlee remembers the smell of gun smoke and seeing her pregnant belly “go flat.” Falling onto the couch, she was shocked to see no blood. Somehow, she ran to the bedroom to call 911, but there was no dial tone—the line had been cut. She tried to escape through the windows, but he had nailed them shut. She thought he would kill her and her daughter before turning the gun on himself. Miraculously, her daughter stayed quiet in the next room. “I think he just forgot about her,” she says. Brownlee screamed, but, “I realized nobody knows I’m here. Nobody visits us. This is it. It’s over.”
Over an hour and a half, he shot her ten times: three in the stomach, once in the arm, once in the buttock, once in the hip, and four times in the vagina. He beat her over the head with a wooden board. “You don’t want to be with me?” she recalls him shouting. “I gave you everything you wanted, and it still wasn’t enough!”
In her dream, Brownlee had played dead so her attacker would leave her alone. Now, she did the same. Eventually, she lost consciousness.
Her ex dragged her body into the bathtub. She would have died there if his cousin hadn’t arrived. The cousin had spoken to him hours earlier and was alarmed by his “manic” tone. When he found Brownlee soaked in blood, he put her in his car and drove her to the hospital.
Brownlee had met the man who tried to kill her when she was 18. He was six years older, had a nice car, and worked as a prison officer. She was impressed by him. Brownlee was raised by her grandmother; her mother had given birth at 16 and abandoned her in the hospital as a newborn. Brownlee’s grandmother, a librarian, struggled with alcoholism after her husband left her and their children. In her memoir, Brownlee describes her grandmother as “a good person who got a bad deal”—a stylish woman who loved Christmas, baking cakes, and cooking soul food feasts. Brownlee still saw her mother, who had another child, but she felt rejected by her. Despite her grandmother’s efforts, it was a chaotic home.In the 1970s, Akashic Books, Brownlee, her grandmother, and aunt lived together in a Brooklyn brownstone. They rented their apartment from a drug dealer and pimp who lived downstairs and hosted parties almost every night—Brownlee recalls seeing piles of cocaine on the table. During this time, she was sexually abused. When Brownlee was 10, their landlord lost the building in a bet, forcing them to move to the nearby Brevoort projects.
At 14, Brownlee became pregnant by an older teenager. Frightened, she initially tried to ignore the pregnancy and later attempted to miscarry by rolling down a flight of stairs. By the time her grandmother found out and her mother took her to a clinic, she was 27 weeks along—too late for an abortion. Brownlee left school in ninth grade to care for her baby. Her mother wanted to put the child up for adoption and even took the baby away for months, but Brownlee insisted on keeping her daughter.
When Brownlee was 17, her mother died of cancer. Not long after, through her aunt’s boyfriend, she met the man who would later try to kill her.
His violent nature first emerged a few months into their relationship when she became pregnant. After she expressed her desire for an abortion, he beat her and destroyed her referral letter for the procedure. Her grandmother witnessed the abuse but urged Brownlee to stay with him, believing he could offer her a better life.
He proposed at Christmas in 1989, and Brownlee moved from her grandmother’s home into his parents’ basement in Bedford-Stuyvesant while they waited for their new house to be built. Though he treated her daughter well, Brownlee describes living with a man who had a volatile temper. Weeks after their engagement, in January 1990, he pushed her down the stairs during an argument. She felt sharp abdominal pain and called an ambulance. A police car also arrived, but when she reported the assault, her fiancé “flashed his badge” and spoke to the officers privately. Both the police and ambulance left, and her fiancé took her to the hospital, where she went into labor and gave birth to their second daughter a month early.
In 1991, the couple and their new baby moved into the house on Long Island. Brownlee hoped for a fresh start, but the beatings grew more frequent and severe. Isolated and far from everyone she knew, she felt trapped.
Brownlee reported the violence to the police three times, but each time, officers left after her fiancé showed his badge—even when she had visible injuries. Feeling abandoned and with no safe place to go, she once tried to leave and returned to her grandmother’s, but he found her and forced her back. She finally left for good in late 1992 after he beat her over the head with a piece of a chair. By then, she had secretly begun a relationship with a neighbor, which showed her what love could be like, and she had discovered she was four months pregnant with her ex-fiancé’s child. Reflecting back, Brownlee says all the signs were there that he would eventually try to kill her.
After the attack, Brownlee woke up in the hospital surrounded by women praying for her. One of them was a cousin of her ex, who would support her during her early recovery. Brownlee had been in a coma for nine days. As she moved from intensive care to a ward, she began to piece together what had happened: her ex had been arrested because she managed to identify him as the shooter and provide his address.Before losing consciousness, Brownlee’s daughters were living with her ex-partner’s mother, who had moved out of state. Doctors did not expect her to survive. While she was in the hospital, Keri Herzog, the assistant district attorney who later became her friend, informed Brownlee that she had taken a dying declaration from her before she slipped into a coma. Brownlee had no memory of this.
In her hospital bed, a doctor delivered several devastating blows: her unborn baby had not survived, she would not be able to have more children, and she would never walk again. She was told it was a miracle she was alive, but she felt overwhelmed by the weight of it all. In her memoir, she wrote that her daughters were the only reason she could find to keep living.
Brownlee spent about three weeks in the hospital, beginning physical therapy there and continuing at home. At first, the exercises seemed pointless, but she persisted and made remarkably fast progress. By the end of the summer, she was walking on her own. Around this time, she found her faith and was baptized.
After her discharge, her ex’s mother let her stay in the Bedford-Stuyvesant house. But when Brownlee refused to write to the judge claiming she had shot herself, her mother-in-law evicted her, she says. Brownlee and her children then moved into a homeless shelter in the Bronx while waiting for assisted housing. Reflecting on that period, she says, “Homeless, hungry, two kids, lost one in the process. Just continuing pain, but you try to normalize it.”
Her ex’s trial was scheduled for April 1994. Brownlee was hesitant to testify, wanting to move on and believing he would get off lightly due to his work in law enforcement. But Herzog insisted, telling her, “I will hunt you down like a dog and drag you onto the witness stand myself if I have to!” Brownlee agreed to testify.
Years later, during a CBS documentary about her, Brownlee learned that a letter in her name, possibly written by her mother-in-law, had been submitted to the judge by the defense. The letter, a copy of which the Guardian has seen, stated that Brownlee would not press charges and would testify for the defendant if subpoenaed.
However, her ex pleaded guilty. Herzog requested a sentence of 25 years to life. Six bullets remained in Brownlee’s body; her doctor had warned that removing them would be too risky. (She still has them, covered by a tattoo over the scars.) His lawyer argued it was a crime of passion and that his client, a prison officer with no prior record, deserved leniency. The judge granted the request for five to 15 years. “I was totally gutted,” Brownlee says, feeling once again that the justice system had failed her.
As the years passed, Brownlee and her daughters moved to East Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she tried to establish a routine. But she struggled, especially in relationships—including one with a man in prison and another with a drug dealer. “At that point, I was so damaged… How could you even identify a healthy relationship if you’ve never seen one?” For years, she felt she was merely existing, not living. “I normalized feeling numb. Crying at night when nobody knows you cry.”
At 27, seeking purpose and independence, she enrolled in the NYPD traffic academy and took night classes for her high school diploma, with her partner helping with childcare. When offered the chance to take the police exam, she passed and became a police officer in 2001.
Why did she want to become a cop?After all she had been through, why did she become a police officer? To be a “good cop,” she says. “If someone like me doesn’t step in to bridge the gap between the community and the police, who will?” She specifically wanted to see more empathy toward civilians, an end to racial profiling, and mutual respect between officers and the public.
Brownlee excelled in undercover assignments, working in narcotics and later vice. Many of the sex workers she encountered shared similar backgrounds with her. “Most, if not all, came from some form of abuse or neglect,” she notes.
She started therapy in 2009, beginning years of intensive personal work. “The first time I went to therapy, I completely broke down. I just wanted to hide in this woman’s purse. It was probably the first time in my life I had ever felt safe,” she recalls. Over time, she sensed a change within herself: “I started to believe that if I kept going, kept my eyes on the light and followed it, I could fully recover.”
She was far from alone as a victim of domestic violence at the hands of a police officer. Research from the 1990s showed that U.S. police officers were two to four times more likely to abuse their families compared to the general population. Still, she never told her colleagues that she had nearly been killed by a law enforcement officer, fearing they would see her as mentally or emotionally unfit for the job. She also avoided specializing in domestic violence cases, feeling that support for victims was inadequate and sentences for perpetrators were too lenient.
Her memoir, which she began writing around 2017 and published this year, is sharply critical of the NYPD at times, particularly its culture of officers not reporting each other for misconduct. “I saw how the police really are a family—they truly believe in this ‘blue wall of silence,'” she says. She advocates for mandatory therapy for officers, explaining, “Police officers are exposed to a lot out in the field, and it’s heavy. Then they have to come home and be husbands, wives, parents, or caregivers… They need an outlet.”
After her work in vice, Brownlee moved to community affairs, which she saw as the ultimate “good cop” role. She founded a mentoring program called Young Ladies of Our Future for at-risk teenage girls, helping them build confidence and offering guidance on relationships, including recognizing signs of abuse. She believes it would have helped her as a teenager: “Even if you have to return to that difficult situation at home, you still walk away with some tools.” Later, she served on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s security detail, becoming one of the first Black women to do so.
Brownlee retired in 2021 after 20 years of service, ending her career as a first-grade detective. Soon after, she was interviewed by the New York Times. Following the article’s publication, she received an anonymous call from someone who identified himself as a former police officer. He wondered if he had been one of the officers who left when her ex showed his badge, despite seeing her injuries. “He said, ‘I worked at that precinct at the time, and I’ve had incidents where I’ve done that. If that was me, I’m sorry.’ Then he hung up.”
What would she have said to him if he had stayed on the line? “Why didn’t you help me if you saw me with a black eye? How would you feel if that had been your daughter or someone you loved?” She adds that he could have been the “key” to preventing the attempted murder from happening.Brownlee’s ex-husband was released after serving 10 years in prison. She has worked hard to forgive him. “I was so angry and bitter, but I didn’t want to be defined by those feelings,” she says. “I truly believe in the power of forgiveness—not for the other person, but for yourself and for the people around you.” Since his release, they have been in the same room only once, when she attended his mother’s funeral to support their daughters. They did not speak.
Now 55, she has built a career focused on advocacy, coaching, and mentoring. After decades of staying silent about the assault she endured, she now speaks openly about domestic violence, including to law enforcement groups. She is pushing for legislation in New York that would, among other things, prohibit anyone convicted of domestic violence from owning firearms. “If we can keep guns out of abusers’ hands, we could cut domestic homicides by half,” she states. She is also working to create a domestic violence registry, which would allow people to check whether a new partner or someone close to them has a related conviction. Additionally, she advocates for mandatory rehabilitation and training for domestic abusers, noting that many leave prison unchanged. “If you only treat the symptoms, the symptoms will return,” she explains.
Starting at the end of the year, she will also begin visiting federal prisons to speak with men who have committed domestic abuse and other violent crimes, offering them mentoring and coaching.
“Domestic violence doesn’t just come from someone deciding, ‘I’m an abuser,'” she reflects. “It often stems from their own experiences and upbringing. When I speak to people who have been abused or neglected, I can relate to them.” She sees this as a starting point while waiting for legislative changes. “If I can’t get Congress and the government to act, then I’ll take the first step myself, hoping they’ll follow.”
These days, when she’s not traveling for work, Brownlee divides her time between her homes in New York City and the South. She stays active by walking 3.5 miles daily and continues therapy when needed. Her religious faith is a guiding force in her life. “This is something I will never get over—I’ve learned to live with it,” she says.
Publishing her memoir this year brought her closer to some family members, who she says hadn’t fully grasped what she went through until they read it. Some have apologized for not recognizing the signs that something was wrong. She holds no grudges, however. Her daughters, now 35 and 40, have not read the book. “Whenever they’re ready, they’ll read it. I don’t want to trigger my children,” she explains. Brownlee also remains close with her ex-husband’s cousin, who saved her life.
While she focuses on the future, the memory of that morning in January 1993 stays with her. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. But I’ve learned to accept that this is my life, and how I respond is what matters. I was dealt a losing hand, but in the end, I was able to win.”
Katrina Brownlee’s memoir, And Then Came the Blues: My Story of Survival and My Rise in the NYPD, is available now (Akashic Books, £26.99). In the UK, the national domestic abuse helpline is 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is 1800 737 732. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs based on the scenario you provided with clear and direct answers
General Motivational Questions
Q Why on earth would you want to join the police especially after what happened to you
A My experience gave me a unique understanding of violence and victims I wanted to use that perspective to protect others and prevent similar tragedies from happening to them
Q What does an undercover officer actually do
A An undercover officer assumes a false identity to infiltrate criminal organizations gather evidence and help build cases from the inside without the criminals knowing they are police
Q Werent you terrified to go back into a dangerous situation
A Absolutely But the fear was different It was a focused fear driven by a purpose to stop criminals rather than the helpless fear I felt as a victim
Process Training Questions
Q How did you even qualify to become a police officer after such severe injuries
A It required extensive physical therapy to pass the rigorous department fitness and medical exams It was a long and difficult recovery process
Q Did your personal history help or hurt your application
A It was a doubleedged sword The department was concerned about my physical and mental readiness but they also saw my unique motivation and deep understanding of criminal violence as a potential asset
Q Is the training for undercover work different from regular police training
A Yes After the police academy undercover officers receive specialized training in building a cover story deception detection managing stress in highrisk situations and advanced surveillance techniques
Personal Psychological Questions
Q How do you deal with the psychological stress of the job
A Its a constant challenge I rely heavily on a trusted therapist provided by the department and a very small confidential support network of other officers who understand the pressure
Q Do you ever have to interact with people like your ex in your undercover work
A Unfortunately yes I encounter abusive and violent individuals regularly My past experience helps me recognize the patterns and behaviors which I can use to my advantage in the role
Q How do you maintain your cover without losing your real self
A This is one of the hardest parts I have strict boundaries and decompression rituals when Im off the clock to reconnect with who I
