I met her outside the car dealership on Broadway. As promised, she was dressed in light blue, with a darker blue compression stocking running the length of her right arm.
I took her to lunch and listened to her awful, gruesome story. And every bit of it I believed — except for the part about who she says cut off her right hand.
Andrea Montoya is 41, a short, petite woman who bears the scars of a life lived hard and, not too infrequently, violently.
She carries the date on a white slip of paper everywhere she goes. May 23, 2008, it reads. “The day my life changed forever.”
It started out a bad day, she remembers. Her husband, Fred, a construction worker with a long rap sheet, began drinking from the moment he awoke. And as usual, they immediately began arguing.
Fred left the house early. It was sometime in the late afternoon when he returned. In her telling of the story, Fred came back with a couple of men she didn’t know. They were smashing things in the Capitol Hill apartment. It roused Andrea Montoya from her nap.
One of the men, she said, grabbed her by the neck.
“If you don’t give it to me, I’ll cut her (expletive) throat!” she remembers the man screaming.
“I saw metal flash,” she recounted, “and my right arm went up instinctively. It was like a dream from there, like I was in a cloud. All three of them, including my husband, ran. The next thing I knew, I was in the hospital.”
Doctors later told her that her hand had been severed at the wrist, only a tiny sliver of bone keeping it on the arm. Two surgeries, a couple pieces of metal and numerous screws later, the hand was reattached.
Andrea Montoya now lives in a battered women’s shelter, her apartment having been looted of every personal belonging by neighbors and, she thinks, Fred.
She orders her lunch to go. She has an appointment at an Aurora mega-church she joined right after being released from the hospital. Folks there, she says, are helping her pull her life back together.
Her relationship with Fred — well, it had always been a stormy, alcohol-charged relationship. Three times she called the police after he beat her. “This was the last time,” she says, pointing to the large scar on her nose.
The man, now 52, has been in Denver County Jail for nearly six months now, charged with first- degree assault with a deadly weapon in connection with the May 23, 2008, attack. “They think he did it because of his past record with me,” Andrea Montoya said.
Through the church, she is finishing her high school education online. Unable to work, she gets by on a $200-a-month disability stipend.
Workers at the shelter have asked her to share her story with the other women. She has written a first draft of her speech. She asks me to read it.
It is written in pencil on an orange sheet of paper. It took forever because she is still teaching herself to write with her left hand. “I have tricks and a way to do things now,” she says, adding she can now tie her shoes and comb her hair perfectly with her left hand.
She tries to pick up the pepper shaker with her right hand. It falls to the table. Andrea Montoya begins sobbing. “I have to live with this ugly, scarred hand every day. I have to live with it!”
Startled and not knowing what to do, I start reading her speech.
“You don’t have to be scared or ashamed of your life anymore,” the speech begins. “I am finding help. I could not let what happened to me steal my dreams or stop me from being the woman I can be.”
She alternately laughs and cries on the drive to the church. Once there, she gathers her lunch, papers and purse with her left hand, opens the door and steps out.
“Please don’t pity me,” Andrea Montoya says before disappearing inside.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
