She said she had never fired a gun before.
But in just a matter of seconds, Queens mom Barbara Sheehan managed to pull the triggers on two guns 11 times, leaving her abusive, retired-cop husband dead on the bathroom floor.
“I knew he was positively going to kill me,” a sometimes-weeping Sheehan told a rapt Queens jury about her husband, Raymond, at her murder trial yesterday.
“He would always chase me and catch me. So I knew he would catch me. So I shot the gun. I don’t know how many times I shot. I just fired. I stopped firing when I didn’t feel threatened anymore. I grabbed the guns, closed the door and ran downstairs.”
For nearly 20 years, Sheehan insisted, she had suffered torrents of daily abuse, insults, threats and violence that left her with black eyes, a broken nose and a battered spirit.
“He’d hit me on my nose, in my eyes. I couldn’t physically fight him back. He was a lot bigger than me,’’ she said.
But the 50-year-old woman insisted that it wasn’t revenge that led her to shoot her husband on Feb. 18, 2008, as he was shaving in their Howard Beach home. It was survival.
According to Sheehan, she and her husband had viciously argued the night before his slaying.
He then picked up where they’d left off the next fateful day, she said, dragging her out of bed and down the stairs at 7 a.m., insisting she go with him on a trip to Florida.
Fearing she’d never make it back to New York alive — since he had beaten her badly on their last getaway — Sheehan continued to refuse to go on the trip, until he held a gun to her head, just another one of the many times he had used that method of persuasion, she said.
Sheehan testified that it was then that she realized she had to finally make a run for it.
After a short trip to a nearby friend’s house for moral support, Sheehan said, she returned home to get some cash she had stashed away, planning to leave Raymond once and for all.
“I just had to get away,” Sheehan testified. “I didn’t want him to hurt me or my kids.’’
But fearing the worst, she said, she grabbed one of her husband’s guns “thinking maybe he wouldn’t shoot me if I had the gun.”
Raymond quickly emerged from the bathroom, another other gun in his hand, she claimed.
“He said he was going to kill me,” Sheehan said, breaking down in sobs. “So I shot the gun I had in my hand. He had the big gun, I had the little gun. I don’t know how many times I shot it. I couldn’t aim it. I just shot. I never shot a gun before.”
Sheehan said Raymond dropped his gun and slid down between the bathtub and the toilet, bloody and screaming and still threatening to kill her.
When he reached for his gun again, Sheehan said, she beat him to it and used it to finish the job.
“I didn’t intend to kill him,” she insisted. “I just wanted him to stop and not kill me.”
Before describing the shooting for the jury, Sheehan detailed the alleged abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband, including the mental torture she was forced to endure watching him perform kinky sex acts while he pranced around in women’s clothes and adult diapers, she claimed.
“Our sexual relationship was never really good, but it was OK,” Sheehan admitted.
She said much of the physical abuse she suffered was witnessed by their two children, Jennifer, now 25, and Raymond Jr., now 21, who are both scheduled to testify for their mom.
She said Raymond flew off the handle for the most trivial of things — their son’s dirty diaper when he was a baby, a home-cooked meal he didn’t like.
So controlling was her husband that he checked her shopping receipts for time stamps when she returned from the store to make sure she didn’t dally on her way back home.
“If I did, he’d hit me or curse me,” Sheehan said.
She claimed that her husband once threw boiling-hot marinara sauce on her because he wanted something else for dinner.
“I sought medical attention for it,” Sheehan said. “But I had to lie about what happened because he threatened to kill myself and my kids . . . He’d hold a gun to my head and said that if I went to the doctor and told them what happened, he’d kill me and the kids and go down in glory. I didn’t know how to deal with it.”
She said he would boast that his police experience would help him cover up the crime.
Sheehan said he carried at least two guns in the house all the time, in his waistband or on his ankle.
“While he was watching TV, [one] would be on the table,” Sheehan said.
“He’d take it to the bathroom, and while he was showering, he always had a gun on him.”
“I tried calling 911, and he’d beat me with the receiver,” a teary Sheehan went on. “He said, ‘I’m the police and they’d never believe you.’ ”
Raymond’s twin brother looked on shaking his head, as Sheehan testified.
For days, her supporters have been wearing purple to show their support for victims of domestic violence. Sheehan took the stand wearing a purple cashmere scarf.
On cross-examination, prosecutors called the spousal abuse “alleged,’’ and hammered home the idea that she had clearly “shot and killed’’ her husband — repeating it to the point that her lawyer, Michael Dowd, objected, and the judge sided with the defense.