Trial begins for woman who claims self-defense

PALMER — From the very start, Lisa Donlon has told authorities she shot her husband.

“I think my husband’s been shot,” Donlon, 40, told emergency dispatchers on Oct. 7, 2010, when she called the police. The tape of her conversation was played for jurors Thursday during the second day of Donlon’s trial for murder.

“Why do you think he’s been shot?” dispatcher Jody Towsley asked.

“I did it,” Donlon eventually replied.

On the recording, Towsley asks why, but Donlon doesn’t want to say in front of her kids, ages 8 and 10, who were close by in their small Butte-area home and can be heard in the background throughout the call. Eventually, though, the kids were out of earshot.

“Why did you shoot your husband?” Towsley asked.

“Because he threatened to kill me. He’s been physically torturing me for three days,” Donlon told her. “He punched me in the face and threatened to kill me. And when I died he’d have to kill my kids because he couldn’t let anyone else raise them.”

For a brief while, even though her husband was asleep when he was shot, Alaska State Troopers and prosecutors sided with Donlon. A grand jury in Palmer failed to bring charges against her soon after the shooting.

Two months later, though, that same grand jury changed its mind. Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak said at the time that new evidence came to light and was likely what swayed those jurors. Later hearings called into question the veracity of Donlon’s claims of abuse and to what degree she was abused.

“There’s no way it rises to a level where shooting a sleeping man is justified,” Kalytiak said in December 2010.

Jason Donlon and his wife and kids lived in a small house — on the 911 call Lisa Donlon describes it as a “shack” — behind his parents’ house. Their relationship was rocky enough that Lisa Donlon had asked for — and received — a restraining order in 2006. Jason Donlon was charged with — but never convicted of — violating that order.

Whether evidence of that prior restraining order will make it into this trial is still an unsettled question. But Donlon’s attorneys — Zachary Renfro and Windy Hannaman — are defending the shooting of Jason Donlon as self-defense.

As they picked jurors earlier in the week, Hannaman asked potential jurors if they could imagine a situation in which a sleeping person could be shot in self-defense. With the right set of circumstances, many agreed they could.

Those jurors have so far heard the 911 call and from investigating troopers, among others.

On that 911 call, once the floodgates had opened Donlon didn’t hold back in describing her husband’s alleged abuse.

“He said, ‘I know how to torture you until you die a slow painful death,’” she told dispatchers.

The call ends when troopers arrive on scene and Donlon set the phone down. Towsley, referring to log notes, testified that officers had arrived on scene around 7 a.m. and remained at the residence gathering evidence until after 10 p.m.

Trial is expected to last through next week. Donlon has not declared whether she intends to take the stand or not.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.