Woman Beaten Into Coma Dies 21 Years Later In Loving Home

An upstate New York woman has died at the age of 51 after spending the last 21 years of her life in a coma that her drunken husband beat her into.

Bernadette Jones of Niagara Falls became comatose after her drunken husband beat her into a permanent state of unconsciousness back int 1991. Buffalo News recounts the story of how her family cared for her over the next two decades. Jones’ family, including her three children, took care of her in a separate room annexed onto the back of their home. It was a warm, special place that the family filled with music. They would sit with her and read passages from the Bible, offering her the loving companionship she would have received if she had been with them consciously throughout the years.

Family members brought Jones home from the hospital eight months after the attack. Her three children crawled into bed and slept with her on her first night home.

“You have to do it willingly and 300 percent or don’t do it,” said stepfather Robert Anderson Jr. “Through all the trials and tribulations we went through, we never once argued over Bernadette. When we first brought her home, her brother gave up his room in the basement for her. We didn’t even have a bathroom down there. A friend built one. We weren’t going to let her end up in a nursing home. She wouldn’t have lasted. We always believed that at some level, she was conscious, though there were no words or laughter.”

She never awoke, and succumbed to pneumonia on Sunday, at the age of 51, reports Newser.

The man who put her in the coma she would never awaken from was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison, and was then deported back to Haiti as an illegal immigrant.