When police arrived, they found Murray on the floor with a stab wound in his chest. McCarter called 911 (neighbors later reported that they’d heard her screaming for help). (In the court transcripts, neither the prosecutor nor her defense attorney offers particularly specific details of that night’s assaults.) By then, McCarter had grabbed a kitchen knife to ward off another attack. Finding no money there, he assaulted her again. When she refused and told him to leave, he became violent until she agreed to give him her purse. Instead he became belligerent, demanding money. McCarter let him in, hoping he would sleep it off on her couch while she did her homework. That night, Murray was intoxicated and had locked himself out of his apartment, where he’d left his wallet. The building’s management company had warned McCarter that if Murray continued this behavior, the company would evict her.

Sometimes he passed out in front of the building. On previous occasions, when she did not respond, he would buzz other neighbors until someone let him in. According to court transcripts, the 44-year-old had returned home from work on March 2, 2020, when Murray, age 48, rang her buzzer. McCarter, who’s facing a potential prison sentence of 25 years to life, declined to discuss what happened in the moments before police arrived at her apartment on the night of Murray’s death. It’s a bind she shares with many other domestic violence survivors who act in self-defense, only to find themselves ensnared in the legal system.

This awful tragedy is actually not that unusual. But then, more than two years ago, she was forced to put those plans on hold, McCarter told me in the first of several interviews conducted in her apartment, where she is confined not because of the pandemic, but because the Manhattan district attorney’s office is charging her with murder-for Murray’s death.

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