In 2008, my mom passed away. I was 19 at the time. My sister and her brother-in-law moved in to my mom's place to take over everything. They said they'd let me live with them because I was in school pursuing an education. I thought this was awesome of them.

Turns out brother-in-law has a problem with alcohol and prescription pain killers. He regularly gets drunk and takes his pain meds and becomes incredibly violent, beating my sister and threatening to kill everyone (my teenage nephew and my sister's twins, who were around 8 at the time, and myself). Cops get called, he gets arrested, he gets let out the next day. Rinse, lather, repeat. Each episode gets worse and worse. He eventually got to the point where he was using his hunting rifles to hold us at gunpoint. He eventually gets on disability for his back and he also found an incompetent doctor to sign off on some documentation that says he's mentally unstable so he can dodge jail time (the cops, for some reason, refused to arrest him most of the time after that because of the documentation and told us we weren't allowed to harm him because it would be the equivalent of assaulting a disabled person. I'm not very savvy to the law so I'm not sure if it was just the cops trying to avoid having to do work or not, but our local cops are pretty lazy in general so I assume that was the case). Basically, it was a never ending cycle of abuse and death threats. I didn't know what to do during these situations so I would basically grab the younger kids and just get them out of the situation so that wouldn't be hurt, but it left my sister and my teenage nephew to receive the brunt of the abuse. I often felt like a coward for running. My sister refused to leave him for the longest time and I used to hate her for it, but looking back, I can see she probably stayed with him out of fear that he'd hunt us down and kill us. She eventually left him after a final altercation where the police actually locked him him up for a decent period of time. She used it as an opportunity to get all of her things and run. I was off at University at the time so I was mostly out of the picture during most of the end.

That man was the most hateful human being I ever met, and was the first time I ever realized that some people truly deserve to die.