Texas Observer, March 2022
Stephanie Johnson had never liked her daughter’s volatile second husband, Shaun Hardy. But she didn’t know how dangerous he was until six weeks after the couple’s 2015 divorce, when her daughter messaged to say he’d just beaten and strangled her. “I thought he was going to kill me,” Anne-Christine Johnson, 29, wrote in a Facebook message just after dawn on June 16. “I begged for my life and as soon as he let me up, I ran out of the apartment as fast as I could, barefoot.” The attack had ended around 3 a.m., and she’d hitchhiked to a League City hospital. Shaun, a municipal employee from a prominent local family, hadn’t been arrested, Anne-Christine wrote her mom.
In the emergency room, a League City police officer “immediately” observed “dark bruising and ligature marks wrapped almost completely around her neck,” according to his report. But by then, he’d already spoken with Shaun, who claimed she’d attacked him with a knife. Both would be investigated, the cop explained. Either could go to jail. Anne-Christine was terrified and thought she needed a lawyer, she said in another message to her mom that morning. But Stephanie, a public relations consultant in Houston, was more optimistic. “He is the one who will need a lawyer because he is going to be prosecuted for attempted murder,” she replied.
