Waterford police dispatcher Jodie Strohl was telling officers to "step it up," because something "very violent" was happening inside the raised ranch at 11 Grabner Drive.

Michael Arteaga's violence toward his ex-wife, Carrie Arteaga, sounded like it might turn deadly. He had just dived through a window and was attacking her and a man she was dating with kitchen knives.

Hearing Carrie Arteaga's terrorized screams, the dispatcher tried to calm her while directing the officers to gain entry to the house "any way you can."

The violence had been escalating since Carrie Arteaga filed for divorce and placed her first 911 call 20 months earlier.

Arteaga, now 35, says the legal system - and the Waterford police, specifically - failed to protect her, resulting in the Aug. 3, 2004, incident. She says the system also failed her ex-husband because, if he was punished adequately for previous crimes against her, he would have had an opportunity to "cool his jets."

Michael Arteaga had been arrested numerous times for violating restraining and protective orders, but he was able to post bond. In the weeks leading up to the stabbing, he had been accused of several crimes for which he had not yet been arrested, according to court documents.

Michael Arteaga is serving a 12-year prison sentence for attempted murder.

Carrie Arteaga has brought a lawsuit that gained some traction last month when a Superior Court judge ruled that a reasonable person could conclude Waterford police officers' response to the escalating violence was "so egregious that they shocked the conscience."

The case, Carrie Arteaga vs. Town of Waterford, et al., has gone further than most lawsuits against municipalities, according to New London attorney Elizabeth A. Sabilia. Judges often dismiss lawsuits against municipalities and individuals who work for them, deeming them "immune" from civil actions.

A trial is scheduled for next year.

"Every police department should be on notice that they can be on trial if they ignore domestic violence victims," Sabilia said.

Waterford Police Chief Murray Pendleton did not return several phone messages about the lawsuit.

First Selectman Dan Steward, who noted the incidents occurred before he was elected, said he turned the case over to the town's insurance carrier. He referred questions to the town's attorney, who did not return a phone call.

Marge Poulious, chairwoman of the town's Police Commission, did not recognize the case. She said she has been out of town and needs to catch up on recent developments.

She's ready to tell her story

Carrie Arteaga worries about the day her ex-husband is released from prison and thinks she might have to move out of state and change her identity. Michael Arteaga, a New York native with a federal drug-dealing conviction on his record, will be turned over to federal authorities upon completion of his state sentence and will serve another 33 months for violation of probation. She thinks she is safe until 2019 or 2020.

A mother of three, Arteaga is a New London native who works as an events manager at Mohegan Sun. She has torn down the raised ranch and built a modular in its place in an effort to exorcise the bad memories. She is living with Julio Torres, who was with her that night and was almost killed by Michael Arteaga. Torres and Carrie Arteaga have a son.

Arteaga has talked to a counselor and taken up running to relieve her stress. She still has trouble sleeping at night - she imagines her ex-husband standing over her - and when she is stressed, she suffers from Bells palsy, or slackness on one side of her face.

She said she's ready to tell her story because everything that happened to her was "so wrong." Her tone alternated between sad and angry when she spoke of her ordeal in a conference room at her attorney's office.

"I feel like it's wrong on so many levels," she said. "No one else should have to be afraid in their own home. All their policies need to be revisited. How they handle it, the way they're trained."

Arteaga says she did everything in her power to protect herself, from obtaining restraining orders and protective orders to drilling her windows shut, putting dead-bolt locks on the doors and having a male cousin move into the house.

The minute someone violates a civil restraining order or a criminal protective order, "that should be it," she said. But her husband said to her, on multiple occasions, "it's only a piece of paper." He was arrested several times for violating the orders and released on low bonds.

"People have told me my kids almost didn't have a mother because (the police) didn't do their job," she said. "I gave them everything I could for them to help me. I constantly felt like I was bothering them."

One time, she said, an officer told her that she and another female domestic violence victim were taking up all of the department's time. She said the officer told her she was lucky, however, because the other woman had had her face smashed.

The only place Arteaga felt safe was at work. She said Mohegan officials banned her husband from the casino property after he came to a fireworks event she was working, chased her around and yelled obscenities.

She questions police actions

On Aug. 3, 2004, she was too weak and exhausted to fight off the crazed man she had married as a pregnant teenager. Michael Arteaga was swinging two butcher knives and stabbing Torres over and over, and she was trying to pull the father of her two children off the man she had just started to date. Torres, whose eye sockets had filled with blood, blinding him temporarily, was begging for his life and telling Michael Arteaga, "Think of your kids."

Arteaga said her ex-husband seemed to be directing all of his rage toward Torres, but she lifts up her sleeve to reveal the scars from two defense wounds she suffered on the arm.

In the chaos, the first Waterford police officer on the scene, Nicole DuPont, pepper-sprayed all three of them. Arteaga understands how that happened.

But she faults the police for failing to arrest her ex-husband for crimes he had committed in the days leading up to the stabbing.

On July 22, he had broken into her house and stood over her while she slept, she said. He broke the house phone, but she called 911 from a backup phone she kept hidden and he fled. The police searched for him all night, finally leaving at 5 a.m. As she left her house three hours later, with her children, he appeared in the driveway and told them all to get into the car. He instructed her to drive to a wooded area.

"Finally, I realized there was no destination," she said. "I was like, 'I'm going to die in the woods or I'm going to make him take me where they can see him.'"

She drove to a gas station on Colman Street and "laid" on the horn. He got out and ran. She told the police where he was, but they went to her house instead. She said she sat on the front step as they stood over her and berated her for getting in the car with him. A neighbor was leaving for work when he noticed Arteaga was crying and appeared to be intimidated by the officers.

"I immediately approached the officers and yelled at them, 'That's enough!''' Brian Langley said in a sworn affidavit for the lawsuit.

The police told Arteaga they would be seeking a warrant for Michael Arteaga's arrest, but they failed to do so by the end of their shift, as they are required to, according to Sabilia.

Two days later, Michael Arteaga forced their 8-year-old daughter into his car, said, "We are all going to die," and drove around with her for hours, according to a police report. The daughter called from a cell phone, saying, "Mommy, I'm scared. All I see is woods." He later dropped the girl off at a friend's house in Norwich.

"It was honestly the worst thing," Arteaga said. "I thought he would kill my baby and then himself."

She also faults the police for escorting the ex-husband to her house two times to "retrieve belongings" nearly a year after their divorce was finalized and months after he released any claim to the home. She criticizes them for not believing her daughter when, one day while she was at work, Arteaga violated a protective order by entering the house and using the home phone to call her. He later told the police he used the cordless phone outside.

"Why don't you just give the benefit of doubt to the victim?" she asked.

Arteaga also says the police failed to contact her husband's federal probation officer until more than two weeks after the stabbings. He could have been charged with probation violations each time he was arrested for domestic violence.

She says the police seemed to be on Michael Arteaga's side from the moment she first called 911, on Jan. 3, 2003.

Divorce papers served

The marriage soured after Michael Arteaga developed a gambling problem, she said. They joined a church and tried to work on the problem, but she gave up on the marriage when her husband went to Atlantic City for a boxing match that Christmas, leaving her with no money for gifts for the children.

She made the first phone call to police after a marshal served him with divorce papers on Jan. 3, 2003. Michael and his mother, who lived with the family, were going berserk, she said. The mother was chasing her around with a broom, calling her names, and Michael, who had never been violent, was yelling. She wanted to leave with her children until they cooled down, but said the first officer on scene prevented her from going. Finally, a sergeant arrived and told her she could leave, but was not to go out of state.

The police had no right to prevent Arteaga from leaving with the children, according to attorney Sabilia.

In 2004, after the divorce was final and there had been multiple incidents, Michael Arteaga pushed his way in the front door after dropping off their two children and, after an argument ensued, pushed her down the stairs. She suffered a broken rib. Arteaga had instructed their daughter to call the police, but the father told the girl he would "break her fingers" if she did.

The lawsuit initially named individual police officers, including Chief Pendleton, patrolman Marc Ballestraci and "unknown officers," but Judge Marshall K. Berger Jr. dismissed the individuals in his March 16 decision on the town's motion for summary judgment. The judge dismissed four out of five counts of the lawsuit but allowed Arteaga to sue the town because "there are genuine issues of material fact as to whether the defendants implicitly but affirmatively encouraged Arteaga's domestic violence or enhanced the danger to the plaintiff because they conveyed to Arteaga that he could continue to engage in domestic violence with impunity."

Laws changed in 1984

Municipal police officer trainees receive 20 hours of instruction on family violence, including eight hours of role playing, according to Lt. Stan Konesky Jr., the domestic violence trainer at the Connecticut Police Academy. Every three years, officers must attend an additional two hours of domestic violence training to maintain their certification.

Konesky says domestic violence law is evolving from Colonial times, when a man was allowed to beat his wife. He said the term "rule of thumb" was coined when it was determined the maximum width of a stick a wife beater could use was the thickness of a thumb.

Konesky tells his students about cycles of violence, the police's duty to protect victims and battered-person syndrome. He talks about the 1984 case of Tracey Thurman of Torrington, which changed domestic violence laws in Connecticut and throughout the country.

Thurman's abusive husband continued to harass her after she obtained a restraining order. Police did little to help, and when he eventually beat her and slashed her throat, she sued the police for failing to protect her and won $2.3 million. As a result, states passed laws mandating police to make arrests in domestic violence cases.

Sabilia said when Arteaga's abuse began, Waterford police had not updated policies on domestic violence for 11 years.

Sabilia depositioned several of the officers who dealt with the Arteaga case.

"I would ask them, 'What do you remember about your training?''' she said. "They would say, 'I remember the course on human trafficking. I remember the course on domestic terrorism.' They don't remember the domestic violence training."

Sabilia said police have to make domestic violence cases a priority. She said if Michael Arteaga had committed the same crimes against strangers, such as breaking into their house, the charges would have been much more serious.

"That's a home invasion," she said.