Photo: Ariane Kunze//The Columbian via AP
On Monday, a Washington state woman was sentenced to 19 years in prison for the Samurai-sword attack on her live-in boyfriend, who she believed was cheating on her, PEOPLE confirms.
The sentence came just over a month afterEmily Javier, 31, pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree domestic violence murder in Clark County Superior Court in connection with the March 3, 2018, attack of Alex Lovell.
“He was severely injured,” Clark County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Anna Klein tells PEOPLE. “He was very lucky. He lost a great deal of blood. His father said he had 26 different stab wounds. He had exposed bone. His knee and elbows were almost severed. He had a couple of fingers that had to be reattached.”
Javier apologized during the sentencing and said she wished “every day I could go back and change what I’ve done,” she said, according to theColumbian.
Alex Lovell.GoFundMe
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Javier allegedly told police that she decided to attack Lovell, whom she had been dating for two years, because she believed he was cheating on her and spent all his time playing video games.
“She told police she felt he was cheating on her and that she was obsessed with him,” she says. “She felt she was working really hard at her job and paying all of the bills and he wasn’t contributing to the household and was spending all of his time playing video games.”
Klein says Javier had plotted her boyfriend’s death for a week.
Javier allegedly chose that evening to act because Lovell ignored her when she came home from work as a manager at a barber shop chain, says Klein.
Klein says she fed him alcohol and when he fell asleep, she pounced.
“Her first strike was the blunt edge of the sword to his throat, so luckily she had the sword turned the wrong way. Otherwise I think he would be dead,” Klein says.
Klein says Javier had originally planned to commit suicide after the attack, but Lovell convinced her to call 911: “He reported that as she was slicing him with the knife he was pleading for his life, telling him she was killing him and begging her to call 911, which she eventually did.”
Javier’s attorney, Chris Ramsay, said his client suffered from sexual trauma as a child and asked the judge to give her a lighter sentence.
That childhood trauma, Ramsay tells PEOPLE, “went unaddressed and untreated her whole life.”
“It is a tragic story,” he says. “She has been remorseful the whole time. She laid everything out for the detectives and gave a full confession.”
At the sentencing, Lovell’s father gave a victim’s impact statement to the court.
“No human being deserves to be attacked in their sleep in this most vicious and barbaric way,” he said, according to theColumbian. “Time does not always heal all wounds.”
source: people.com
