In the middle of the argument, her husband unlocked his gun box, telling her she needed to feel the barrel of his 9mm pistol.
“This has got to be a joke,” Toni Walker recalled.
In seconds, Kent Walker, an Army pilot stationed in Jacksonville, Fla., pinned her to the floor of their bedroom, she said, jamming the barrel into one of her eyes, then into her lips so hard it chipped a tooth.
“Open your mouth, open your mouth,” he said, grinding the barrel against her teeth.
“We don’t want to go out like this,” she remembers crying. “We have a little girl.”
The next few hours were a blur, shifting back and forth between her pleas for him to stop choking her and his putting the gun to his own head, she said. She persuaded him not to kill her, she said, shortly before he collapsed on the bed from exhaustion. She ran to a neighbor’s house to call police.
Jacksonville sheriff’s officers soon entered the house and found him asleep with his fingers curled around the gun, blood on the barrel, according to the report. They arrested him.
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“Our world had crumbled,” she told The Denver Post recently.
The assault on Jan. 19 of this year was the flash point of almost a year of abuse, after her husband, 42, had survived a helicopter crash that killed his co-pilot.
After the incident with the gun, she asked his Florida National Guard commanders to restrict him to the base, records show. A brigadier general wrote back, saying military lawyers would handle the case, but he did not address her specific request.
“They said they would order him not to talk to me, but I told them that that wouldn’t stop bullets from hitting me,” she said. “I felt the military abandoned me.”
She said she asked for a victim advocate to help create a safety plan but never received one. Florida Guard officials did not return calls from The Post.
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Toni Walker was on her own. She spent almost a month in a shelter with her 8-year-old boy and 1-year-old daughter, trying to stay safe and find a job. Finally, she moved into her own apartment. After contacting local crisis centers, she obtained a victim advocate in the Navy to advise her and to help her plan for recovery.
Florida prosecutors dropped the domestic violence case against Kent Walker, his attorney said. Toni Walker said she agonized over whether to testify against him, and finally decided not to.
“He’s been punished enough. I did not want his children to see him go to prison.”
Kent Walker referred questions to his attorney, who told The Post that a polygraph test Walker took substantiated his assertion that he did not abuse her that night. The attorney declined to give the document to The Post.
Toni Walker said she finds solace in the Bible, playing the guitar and being with her children. She also is trying to forgive her husband.
“The scar on my heart is what hurts the most,” she said.
