Abusive husband poured chemicals into wife's eyes

A survivor of horrifying domestic abuse is bravely opening up about the injuries she suffered at her ex-husband’s hands, including the complete loss of sight in one eye after he poured chemicals on her face.

Heather Cornelius’ story first went viral on social media platform TikTok thanks to her willingness to speak candidly in a bid to raise awareness about domestic violence.

In a new interview with PEOPLE, she revealed she believed her ex-husband to be “easygoing and nurturing” when the pair married in 2012. Her friends tried to warn her that he seemed controlling, but Heather said he didn’t show signs of violence for almost 10 years.

“My family didn’t like him, my sisters didn’t like him,” she revealed. “But for almost 10 years, I thought it was a good marriage.”

Sadly, things took a dramatic turn for the terrifying when Heather joined the Coast Guard and began to gain more independence.

“He began to get insecure,” she said. In November 2021, the two of them had a fight after he asked if she had ever danced with anyone at parties in college.

When Heather answered he started “bawling,” accusing her of being a liar “for years,” and ultimately threatening divorce.

“He proceeded to say he didn’t want to be with me anymore: ‘I’m going to leave. And I’m taking the kids with me,’ ” Heather said. “I told him he can leave if he wants to but there’s no way that he’s ever taking my children.”

Things escalated from there, as Heather’s partner began to sexually assault her, twice choking her unconscious during intercourse.

Around one year on from the aforementioned fight in November 2021, Heather summoned the courage to leave, though she soon realized it was virtually impossible to escape his wroth.

The mom explained: “He had tracking apps on my phone, he could track my car via the GPS. I had no money, I had no one to call … I was in a helpless state. He started to call me and say, ‘I want you to come home.’ I told him no.”

According to PEOPLE, Heather spent the night of November 24, 2022 in a public parking lot. The next day her husband drove to meet her and try to convince her to come home.

“He was apologizing, and saying how sorry he was and he didn’t know what was wrong with him — but at the same time, he was threatening me, saying he would tell the police I tried to kill him and I’d lose access to the kids,” she said.

“I went home, and he said I’m really glad we’re back here, and we’re going to make things right.”

Yet when they got home, he gave her an odd request: to lie on the floor.

“My back was turned and he told me, ‘Lay on the floor.’ I didn’t ask anything, I didn’t try to resist,” Heather said. “At that point, when he told me to do something, I did it just to get it over with.”

She went on: “So I did what he said. When I looked up, I saw that he had blue gloves on and a white container. I tried to sit up, he pushed me back down. And he started pouring something in my right eye.

“I was begging for him to stop and screaming. I don’t know how I made it through. I swear, God allowed me to leave my body for a moment to survive. He told me if I wasn’t quiet, he was going to kill me. So I went quiet, and then he started pouring it in my left eye. And then, he was done.”

Heather’s husband immediately began to concoct a lie that would spare him a date with justice. He told Heather to pretend that she had an accident with oven cleaner, telling her “You know you did this to yourself, right?” after taking her to the hospital.

At the hospital, Heather was told that the chemical her husband poured on her face had essentially “melted” her eyelids off. She was airlifted to a level 1 trauma center in Kansas City and put into the ICU burn unit.

“They kept asking what happened and I knew they didn’t believe what I was telling them,” she explained to PEOPLE. “The nurses, everyone kept trying to get me to explain the real story but I just thought, ‘What if he kills the kids and then himself?’ I couldn’t risk that.”

After undergoing three facial surgeries in a week, Heather was sent home.

“After that, he never physically abused me again, and he seemed to like that I was dependent on him,” she recalled. “I didn’t have eyesight for seven months in either eye and my right eye had to be surgically closed. It had scarred over — my retina is intact but I don’t have a cornea to see out of. So they have it covered so it stays protected.”

Then, six months after Heather was sent home from the hospital, the doorbell rang.

“It was May 24, 2023,” she said. “The doorbell rang, and he went outside and didn’t come back … I could hear him yelling at the cops and he made a comment that someone from my command was walking up. Two people from my command said, ‘You can come with us voluntarily or involuntarily, but we need to question you.'”

“They had found out through my work email,” she added. “I had written a draft email to my mother a couple months before it happened … saying things have gotten really bad, I’m scared something’s going to happen to me or to the children. Before I could send the email he turned off the Internet — but it was saved in my work email, which was the only thing he couldn’t access.”

While Heather’s children were placed with a foster family, Heather went to Walter Reed for a psychiatric evaluation.

“I was taken, I was blind, I didn’t know what was going on with my kids. I basically had Stockholm syndrome at the time,” she says.

A psychologist at Walter Reed offered Heather a blunt piece of advice: “We can’t keep you unless you want help. But if you go home — it might not be tomorrow, it might not be any time soon — he’s going to kill you, and your kids need you. Can we please help you?”

“I was [at Walter Reed] because they knew I needed to be kept safe, and had extreme trauma,” Heather explained says, adding that she spent “a few months” in trauma programs before transitioning to life on base. In January 2024, she was reunited with her children.

Her abusive husband, meanwhile, moved to Alaska while the authorities worked on a case against him. On Nov. 1, 2023, police officers arrived at her home and notified her that he had died.

Of her traumatic experience, she said: “I try to describe it to people in this way: It’s like you’re walking in the woods, and you get lost. Everyone else can see what’s happening, and they’re trying to find a route to get you out But everything looks the same and no matter where you go, you stay lost. You can’t always see stuff when it’s so close to you.”

“I’m accomplishing a lot of things that I never thought I would and I view what happened to me as part of the plan God has for me,” she added. “I survived it for a purpose. I don’t look at myself and feel sorry for myself. I look forward to waking up every day.”