On the third floor of the Union, in the back room of the Women's Center, there is a jeweled and embroidered orange T-shirt that tells a piece of the story of Sarah Uhrmacher. Everything that Nancy Myers, the mother of Sarah's best friend, chose for the T-shirt from the color to the little softball glove and treble clef bangles represents a little bit of her life. When I took the T-shirt on a short trip to ask Nancy about the different details, it had been almost six years since she had made it. Nancy was the one who told me Sarah's story.
Sarah grew up in Lincoln, played softball at Southeast, and was very active in the community. Because she loved animals, she went to Zoo School and later came to UNL to study biochemistry. She loved music and played the flute. Sarah was hardworking, dedicated, loving, and spiritual. She would do anything for anyone, like give rides, loan money and try to listen and understand. She just wanted to help.
When she was sixteen, she met Allen Divoky. He was her manager at work and was married with two children. He later got divorced, and they started dating. Divoky also came from a good home, had been an Eagle Scout and went to church with Sarah.
They got engaged when Sarah was a sophomore at UNL.
Sarah wanted to wait to get married until after she finished college though, and a few months into the engagement, things started to go sour. Divoky became controlling, wanting to know where she was all the time, and the couple started to argue more. A year into the engagement, Sarah called it off. It was the end of the first semester of her junior year.
The following April, Divoky found Sarah and stabbed her repeatedly, covering her with self-defense wounds. He bashed her in the head with a hammer and almost decapitated her with a knife.
"She was the last person I expected this to happen to," Nancy Myers said.
A short while later, the police received a call from Divoky who said he was on top of a parking garage, threatening to jump. As they tried to talk him down, they raced to find Sarah, dead in her own home, killed by a man she had almost married. A SWAT team finally managed to talk Divoky down, and he is currently serving a life sentence with no chance of parole. At his trial, he explained himself by saying, "If I can't have her, no one can."
Divoky had never threatened to kill her, but some signs were clearer in hindsight. Not only was he controlling, but he seemed depressed, had charges of domestic violence from his previous marriage, and had had to attend anger management classes.
Sarah's murder was not her fault. She didn't do anything wrong.
"She was a good person," Renee Myers, Sarah's old roommate and best friend, said. "She was a full-time student. She w ent to church every Sunday. She didn't deserve this."
Sarah's death encouraged Renee to go into criminal justice. She wanted to take the horrible experience of losing her best friend and do something positive with it. I, for one, believe she is succeeding. Sarah is not forgotten.
Violence, especially relationship violence, is a problem in our society, and Sarah's story is not as unusual as we would like it to be. College age women experience the highest rate per capita of dating or domestic violence in the U.S. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 85 percent of domestic violence victims are women, and one in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. Think about it. Say you live on a girls floor in Cather, where there are approximately 38 girls. Nine or 10 of them will be abused in their lives.
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