JONESVILLE - Vernetta Cockerham-Ellerbee peeled back the curtain of her bedroom window and saw the man she once loved enough to marry.

Hunched over in a field across the street, Richard Ellerbee toiled, shoveling clumps of dirt over his shoulder. She glanced past him to the nearby police station in this rural Piedmont town of 2,000. She spotted one of the department's nine officers just beyond the station's front door.

Cockerham-Ellerbee rang the station: He's back, she whispered. He was once again violating the judge's order to stay away. Police didn't catch Ellerbee that day. Cockerham-Ellerbee repeatedly reported her husband's threats during the summer and fall of 2002. He never spent a night in jail.

She didn't know what he was up to with the shovel until he called days later to explain: He was digging graves to bury her and the children.

Ellerbee delivered on his threat in November 2002. He broke into their home and fatally stabbed his teenage stepdaughter, Candice Cockerham. He left Cockerham-Ellerbee for dead, too, slicing open her neck with a shard of glass.

Ellerbee escaped to New Jersey where, days later, he killed himself.

The lesson of that day haunts Cockerham-Ellerbee: The protective order designed to keep Ellerbee away from her family was merely a sheet of paper. The promises of police to arrest him came up empty.

Cockerham-Ellerbee wants the protective order to mean something to police. She has been given permission by the state Court of Appeals to try. In an unprecedented lawsuit being followed by domestic violence advocates across the state, Cockerham-Ellerbee is blaming her hometown police department -- officers to whom she once sold coffee at a local market -- for broken promises that cost her daughter's life and shattered her own.

If she prevails, Cockerham-Ellerbee's case will likely force officers in North Carolina to more vigilantly monitor abusers ordered to stay away from their partners.

"We cannot expect victims to do things by the book and not expect law enforcement to do the same," said Peter Romary, a Greenville lawyer who specializes in domestic violence cases. "Everybody has a role to play. Here you've got a [domestic violence] victim do everything right and it wasn't enough because others didn't help her."

Judges and juries in other states have been asked the same question Cockerham-Ellerbee poses: If police fail to vigilantly enforce a protective order, can they be liable for what happens to a victim? Cockerham-Ellerbee's case is the first expected to solicit an answer in North Carolina courts. She hopes a Yadkin County jury will hear her case within a year.

Such a fight, Cockerham-Ellerbee said, is the only way to salvage any good from the tragedy of her daughter's death.

"I can't muster the thought of thinking I didn't do all I could have done," she said. "I can't get past the anger that if the officers would have done what they said they were going to do, she would still be here."

A slow boil

Richard Ellerbee began his relationship with Cockerham-Ellerbee by triggering the breakup of her first marriage. She married young and was rearing Candice in Patterson, N.J., when Richard Ellerbee, a family friend, told her that her husband was unfaithful. She packed up Candice, then 5, and moved south in 1990 to reunite with relatives in her native Jonesville.

Richard Ellerbee followed. For a while, she shunned his advances. He persisted, and she eventually felt herself drawn to what she thought was stability, sureness. They had a boy, Rashieq, in 1996; they married shortly before another son, Dominiq, arrived in 2002.

In those early years, Ellerbee's temper slowly boiled. He lashed out from time to time; Cockerham-Ellerbee found herself tiptoeing. In July 2002, Ellerbee's anger finally erupted. On Independence Day, he beat Cockerham-Ellerbee with a baseball bat, then tried to suffocate her with a pillow, court records show. Police hauled him off and rushed her to the hospital.

When Ellerbee came knocking that evening, begging for forgiveness, she kicked him out and secured a judge's order to keep him away.

That piece of paper -- a restraining order -- promised her a protective bubble, a perimeter of 250 feet that Ellerbee couldn't cross without breaking the law. The stakes were high for Ellerbee; if he broke the rules of the order, he risked going to jail, a condition of his probation for the July assault.

For months, Ellerbee ignored that imaginary line, according to court records. That summer and fall, Ellerbee beat Cockerham-Ellerbee, stalked her on errands, tampered with her fuse box, threatened her relatives and took off with their son Rashieq one afternoon.

As November's chill settled over Jonesville, Cockerham-Ellerbee knew her husband was at a breaking point.

"There was never a break," she said. "That's a bomb getting ready to pop."

Pleas for help

Five days before Ellerbee killed Candice, he broke into Cockerham-Ellerbee's home and stole an heirloom coin collection. He left a death threat in its place.

Cockerham-Ellerbee beckoned Jonesville Police Chief Robbie Coe to take a look at Ellerbee's makeshift graveyard. Coe warned his officers, saying they should keep "a closer watch on what's going on with [the Ellerbees] because it could escalate," he said in a deposition.

The day before Candice was killed, Ellerbee showed up at their son Dominiq's day care. Workers there called police; after Ellerbee fled, Cockerham-Ellerbee rushed to the Jonesville police station. Scott Vestal, one of the officers named in the suit, told her she could go to the magistrate's office and ask them to issue a warrant for his arrest. He said, in a deposition, that it saved him the trouble of talking to all the witnesses or trying to get Ellerbee to admit to what he had done.

Vestal couldn't be reached for additional comment. His lawyer, the current police chief and the mayor did not return repeated phone calls.

The magistrate did believe Cockerham-Ellerbee. He issued a warrant and gave her a copy. She went to drop it off at the Jonesville police station and spotted Ellerbee in her rearview mirror, right on her bumper, sitting tall in his pickup.

As Cockerham-Ellerbee stopped at a red light, she saw Vestal turn onto the street. She flagged down the police officer.

Ellerbee escaped again. Vestal said in a deposition that he wasn't sure the driver was Ellerbee or that he intended to stalk her. The driver slipped away when Vestal tried to take a closer look.

Ellerbee continued to lurk near her that day; she kept calling police.

At dusk, Vestal and his supervisor, Sgt. Timothy Gwyn, met her in her father's yard. She begged them to arrest her husband. About that time, she said, Ellerbee drove by. Vestal and Gwyn hopped in their patrol cars and promised to get him, Cockerham-Ellerbee said.

Both officers dispute that account in their depositions, saying they don't recall having seen Ellerbee drive by them that evening. Coe, the chief at the time, said in his deposition that Gwyn told him he saw Ellerbee drive by that evening and that he hadn't been able to stop him.

Cockerham-Ellerbee said the image is burned in her memory: a blur of blue lights following her husband's truck around a curve. For the first time in more than four months, she let her guard down, confident Ellerbee was finally in jail.

Calm before the storm

That night, Cockerham-Ellerbee cooked dinner at home. She and her children baked a pie; the older ones caught up on homework.

"The tension was gone," she said. For months, "every time we'd hear a branch fall, we were jumpy. It was a mountain of relief that the system does work."

Cockerham-Ellerbee slept deeply that night. She was sure Ellerbee would be out of her life -- and off Jonesville's streets -- for three years. A stack of restraining order violations and a pending assault charge practically guaranteed a judge would find Ellerbee had violated the terms of his probation.

The next morning, Cockerham-Ellerbee and Candice got ready for an appointment with an Army recruiter. Candice went to the library to copy her Social Security card, then came home to wait for her mother to finish running an errand.

When Cockerham-Ellerbee came home 20 minutes later, the front door was cracked open. Candice didn't come when she beeped her horn.

Cockerham-Ellerbee had taken a single step into the foyer when a knife struck her head, its blade breaking off inside. Ellerbee reached for another knife and stabbed her twice more. He then reached for a piece of broken glass from a shelf, shattered in the struggle. He tried to scratch her eyes out and shredded her hands instead as she shielded her eyes. She blacked out as Ellerbee choked her.

Candice's voice jarred her awake. In what Cockerham-Ellerbee now thinks was a dream, she heard her daughter urge her to run.

She hobbled across the field to the police station. Blood warmed her shirt. She heard the wind whistle against her open neck.

Moments later, she collapsed in the police department's lobby.

Ellerbee stopped by a local market to wash off the blood, then headed for New Jersey.

On Nov. 22, as Candice's friends and family leaned over a closed casket to say good-bye, police told Cockerham-Ellerbee they thought they had found her husband.

Ellerbee had doused himself in kerosene and lit a match, police in New Jersey said. Onlookers said he stood perfectly still as he burned to death.

A haunting legacy

Sometimes Cockerham-Ellerbee recognizes her husband in her eldest son Rashieq's jawline and slow, wide smile, and sees the good that survived their relationship.

She and Rashieq find joy in Dominiq, an infant when their lives shattered. Untouched by the memories that haunt his mother, Dominiq dances and laughs with abandon.

She cannot. She can't summon the emotion to scream either. Cockerham-Ellerbee tried to when doctors showed her her lifeless daughter. They had kept Candice's death a secret for three days, afraid if they told her mother, she'd pop the stitches holding her neck together.

Cockerham-Ellerbee is trying to rebuild her life. She moved to Winston-Salem after a bank foreclosed on her Jonesville house. Her hometown became a tough place to be, she said. Cockerham-Ellerbee said she endured harassment from town officials after she filed the lawsuit.

She has had trouble finding work, unable to lift or carry much with her crippled hand. Nightmares jar her awake most nights. She frets about Rashieq, quiet and sullen from damage she can't figure out how to undo.

Two months ago, a friend persuaded her to take off the silk scarf she had worn over her head for five years to veil the scars her husband etched. For eight hours, a beautician worked to comb the knots out of her hair.

Cockerham-Ellerbee cried. It was the freest she had felt in years.