When news broke that two soldiers had been killed in an off-post home near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, early reports left out the third adult in the house that night.
Spc. Dominique House had invited her best friend and fellow 101st Airborne Division soldier Spc. Priscilla East over for dinner with her and her fiance after East called and said she didn't feel safe going home after an argument with her estranged husband.
But East's husband, Jeremy Demar, showed up at House's residence, House told Army Times in a Tuesday phone interview. Demar is accused of shooting his way into the home and killing House's fiancee, Spc. Christopher Hoch, 28, and East, 32.
"It's been a lot survivor's guilt, I guess you could say," she said. "And then reading articles -- I don't know why the police didn't mention my name."
"It feels impossible to live life without them right now," she added.
East had split from her husband in May of last year, House said, and had been plagued by his violence and threats ever since. She filed for a temporary protection order and got it, but by late 2016, a judge had decided not to make the order permanent, according to court documents obtained by the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle.
"He would stalk her outside her home, and she took video of it," House said. "She gave it to the police, and they didn't do anything about it. And they didn't believe her that he was going to kill her."
A spokeswoman for the 101st Airborne Division declined to confirm details of the situation, citing the ongoing investigation by local law enforcement.
"As such, there are a lot of questions that center around the details of what happened and why it happened that we would not be able to address while the incident is under investigation," Lt. Col. Chevelle Thomas said.
Officials with the Kentucky State Police, which is leading the investigation, on Wednesday said they did not have an update to release to the media or public.
Not a love triangle
Despite her concerns, East and her husband still continued to see each other regularly, House said, to exchange custody of their 2-year-old son. It was during one of those meetings on Feb. 2 that Demar -- who had been threatening to kill East but also begging her to take him back, House said -- started another argument with East.
"She sped off, and I think that's what made him mad," House said.
Later that night, Demar showed up at the Oak Grove home that House shared with Hoch and her teenage brother.
"We heard him rev the engine outside, and we just expected him to bang on the door, make some noise," House said. "We never expected him to actually have a gun."
House, Hoch and House's brother watched Demar from the front bedroom window.
"You just see him pacing back and forth, and then you hearing him kicking the door," House said.
Hoch grabbed a baseball bat, she said.
"Then we hear gunshots at the door, to weaken the lock," she said. "He just came in."
Hoch swung the bat and Demar shot him.
"Then he came after me, but his gun was empty," House said. "So when he was reloading, my brother tackled him, and that's when I ran out of the house."
House ran to a neighbor's to call 911.
"And then I just heard Priscilla scream, and then he left," she said. "He just walked out of the house."
House was frustrated with law enforcement, she said, both for denying her friend's pleas for protection and for not responding to the shooting more quickly.
"The ambulance took forever to get there. The dispatcher heard the gunshots and, I mean, I called them back and they just sounded like they didn't care," she said. "It was probably the worst experience of my life, and they didn't care. It was just something that they had to do."
She's also upset, she said, that the police didn't mention her in their statements.
"But I feel like this whole story got skewed toward, it was a love triangle. And that's not what happened at all," she said.
And Facebook comments on the stories made it worse.
"Just a lot of the, 'Oh, they deserved it,' comments," she said. "That's why I decided to speak out. I wasn't going to sit here and just let people run their names through the mud, when they have no idea what actually happened that night."
Now House is in Hoch's Michigan hometown with his family. The infantryman had returned from an Iraq deployment four days before he was killed, and had asked House to marry him just a day earlier.
"We had started to plan our wedding up in Michigan, and now I'm in Michigan planning his funeral," she said.
Demar is being held in Montgomery Count Jail on charges of murder, murder-domestic violence, burglary and assault, according to police.
Meghann Myers is the Pentagon bureau chief at Military Times. She covers operations, policy, personnel, leadership and other issues affecting service members.
