The Daily News

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and North Dakota State College of Science along with Three Rivers Crisis Center sponsored the sixth annual Take Back the Night March. More than 100 people marched to peacefully protest domestic violence and then gathered at the Stern Cultural Center on NDSCS campus to hear a disturbing yet moving story of domestic violence.

Daria Odegaard lived in an abusive household for 17 years. As a young child she remembers feeling that something wasn’t quite right between her mom and dad. She now describes that feeling as an incredible tension. She later found out her dad had been physically, emotionally and mentally abusing her mom for many years. Odegaard is now the director at the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center in Fargo, which is where she grew up.

It was 20 years ago. Odegaard was 6 years old and her mom told her she was getting a third sibling. Odegaard was ecstatic, but remembers her mom being unhappy and her dad was downright angry.

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Soon afterward, Odegaard’s dad disappeared leaving only a note saying, “I’m sick of being a father, I’m sick of being a husband. I quit.”

Odegaard’s mom had a difficult pregnancy with grim predictions from her doctor – the baby would be born but die shortly afterward, mom would die during childbirth or both mom and baby would die. During this time, Odegaard, her mom and two brothers moved out of their home in Hickson and moved in with their grandmother in West Fargo.

Six months after leaving, Odegaard’s father showed up, swearing he’d changed and would never lay a hand on Odegaard’s mother again. The baby was born without complications and perfectly healthy. Again, Odegaard was excited especially because she had prayed for a sister and received her wish.

Everything seemed OK for awhile, but then something changed, Odegaard said. As she entered her pre-teen and teenage years, her dad couldn’t handle all the emotional and physical changes. He began verbally abusing Odegaard, calling her a stupid girl, saying she couldn’t go to college because she was too stupid and that her place was at home.

Odegaard justified her dad’s abuse as her duty as the oldest child. However, the abuse continued, with her dad telling her she wasn’t worth anything because she was a girl. Whereas Odegaard was degraded, her dad treated her brothers differently. He told them they were powerful because they were male.

Into her teens, the physical abuse began. Odegaard clearly remembers her dad just walking by her in the house and hitting, pinching and shoving her or pulling her hair. Odegaard remembers the look he gave, as if to say, “You think this is bad? It can get worse.”

“The one thing I’ll give my dad credit for is he was really good at what he did,” Odegaard said. He was a great deceiver. He always abused Odegaard out of the sight of others. “I thought this was normal for everyone,” she said. “As I got older, it got worse.”

One day in 1998, Odegaard’s dad came home and announced he’d sold the house in Hickson and bought another in Horace. What he was doing was isolating his family to maintain his power over them. They were 10 miles from Fargo, completely isolated from family. It was barely a month after they moved to Horace that Odegaard’s dad’s behavior escalated. At one point, in one of his rages, he picked up Odegaard and threw her across the room. He did the same to her. He continued to demean Odegaard, her brothers and her sister.

In November 1998, Odegaard spoke back to her dad for the first time. There had been a bad snow storm the night before so Odegaard planned to leave even earlier to get into Fargo for school. When she found her keys were missing from the usual hook, she turned around only to see her dad had them. “I’m driving you to school today,” he said. This meant he planned to talk about his and her mom’s marital problems.

He told Odegaard inappropriate things like her mom was having illicit affairs with several men because she put a few extra miles on the car than normal or she went to a PTA meeting. Finally, Odegaard snapped back with a sarcastic comment. Her dad slammed on the brakes. “He turned around to me and said, ‘You shut the bleep up. You will listen to what I have to say and you will believe it,’” Odegaard said. He threatened to make her get out and walk to school, which was still about nine miles away, but put the car back in drive and got back on the road. He continued with the inappropriate conversation and Odegaard blew up again. Her dad again slammed on the brakes and jammed the vehicle into park. It took sheer force and determination to simply stay in the car as her dad tried to shove her out the door.

A few days later Odegaard’s dad came into the kitchen with a sheer look of hatred on his face and said to her mom, “You’re not gonna know when, why or how, but I’m going to kill you.” He said the same thing to Odegaard and then he brought a shotgun into the house. This was the breaking point for Odegaard’s mom and the next day she drove to the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center in Fargo to get help.

That evening, Odegaard’s mom came home to tell her they were going to leave her dad. They waited a few days with hidden packed bags and then Odegaard’s parents went to their pastor to talk about a trial separation. During the separation, her dad was not supposed to have contact with any of the children, was to leave his keys to the house and leave access to finances at the house. He almost instantly broke the agreement by going downstairs instead of packing a bag and told his two sons the entire situation was their mother’s and Odegaard’s fault.

“He told them to ‘do anything necessary to make them pay,’” Odegaard said. Her dad was supposed to have gone to stay with his parents in Fargo. Instead he camped outside the house in Horace in his vehicle with the shotgun. Odegaard and her mom packed as much as they could the next day and moved to Odegaard’s grandmother’s house in West Fargo. The boys were angry and did not believe the situation should be what it was. “They bought into my dad’s lies,” Odegaard said.

Even a protection order could not keep her father away. He pulled the boys out of school for lunch and continued to tell them, “Do anything necessary to make them pay.” Odegaard’s oldest brother kept that promise soon after. On New Year’s Eve 1998, Odegaard’s oldest brother was in the bathroom, getting ready for a party and Odegaard asked him to hand her the curling iron. Without warning, he threw a punch that connected with her body. He continually hit, kicked and punched her, breaking one of her ribs. All the while, her younger brother stood by and watched, doing nothing. Odegaard’s grandmother called the police. They arrested her oldest brother and that’s the last time she saw him.

Soon thereafter, Odegaard’s parents divorced. The judge ruled the boys were too violent to stay with their sisters and mom so Odegaard’s dad got custody of them. The family was in court for an entire year and this is when Odegaard learned her sister had also been abused, not only physically, mentally and emotionally, but sexually abused.

Odegaard has been out of the abusive hold of her dad for 10 years now, but he is still in the Fargo area. He drives by her house from time to time, yells obscenities and flips her off. When he sees her in public, he will even chase her to her car. Her brothers are unfortunately “carbon copies of their father,” she said.

But, Odegaard made a conscious effort many years ago to not live in fear. She considers herself, her mom and her sister survivors. Her mom just remarried a week ago to supportive, loving man and her sister is in college working to be an early childhood educator. Odegaard’s strength is drawn from those around her. She said she has a fantastic support network of not only her family but role models and co-workers.

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