SPOKANE, Wash. – Jacqueline Mattingly was on the brink of death. Stabbed over a dozen times, she said she felt her lungs fill with blood as she barely escaped out the front door, with paramedics waiting for her.
She barely survived after being hospitalized for three weeks. Her husband, David Leroy Johnson, wasn’t as fortunate.
“(I) Leaned over him while she was stabbing me in the back and I said ‘Baby, I know you’re dying I love you. And I love you today, I’ll love you tomorrow. Till we meet again,” said Mattingly.
Mattingly and Johnson had a close relationship. They got engaged after just two weeks of meeting each other in 2012.
“We were really close, we loved each other no matter what,” Mattingly stated.
On June 5, Mattingly walked into her house to a horrifying scene.
“I got stabbed directly in my eye. I brought my hand up like this, went through my hand, directly into my eye and out of my other eye I could see him lying on the floor,” said Mattingly.
Police said Mattingly’s daughter, 34-year-old Kelly Hyde, is responsible. Court documents indicate that Hyde confessed and is now awaiting trial for second-degree murder.
Police say Hyde told them she had a fight with Johnson earlier that evening.
“I’m really autistic and really really not okay around violence. I just don’t handle it well and I just went crazy,” she said.
However, Mattingly believes her daughter’s actions were influenced by drugs.
“She had gotten on fentanyl and something and she OD’d and went crazy. I don’t think that she even realized who we were,” she said. “She had been doing this for about two months, we were afraid she was going to kill herself.”
Johnson’s injuries were fatal, and Mattingly was also severely wounded.
“She cut off my fingers and I ran out the door screaming for help,” Mattingly said.
Mattingly said Hyde destroyed all the phones in the home to prevent them from calling 9-1-1. After being stabbed around 15 times, Mattingly believed Hyde had left and tried to reassemble a phone.
“And (she) stabbed me like five more times and said ‘die, bitch,'” said Mattingly.
In a desperate situation, Mattingly prayed for help.
“God, I need to get this door open somehow, someway, if I don’t I think I die right here,” she prayed.
Her prayer was answered when the door opened, and medics arrived, responding to her medical alert device.
“I just fell out in a bloody ball right on the front porch,” said Mattingly.
Jacqueline Mattingly spent three weeks in the hospital, part of that time in a coma, followed by three months adjusting to life without her husband.
“It’s hard to believe that he can even die when he loved living so much,” she said.
Her house is still filled with his stuff. A veteran, Johnson has a wrapped up flag resembling his service, a veterans hat, a pair of sunglasses – all sitting in the kitchen where he was killed three-and-a-half months earlier.
After Johnson’s death, many in the community reached out, especially given his visibility as a low-level public figure, sitting off the I-90/Sunset Boulevard exit near Airway Heights, waving at passing cars.
“A lot of people found out and put flowers and stuff on the corner and on the house and red, white and blue things because he was a veteran,” she said. “They had a chair – and I’m amazed it stayed there as long as it did – and it had ‘R.I.P. David’ on it.”
Mattingly said she was close with Hyde, and Johnson may have been even closer.
“My daughter was a beautiful girl, sweet as can be,” she said. “Until this.”
At the time of the attack, Mattingly said her daughter was almost unrecognizable, with black eyes.
“It was almost like she was possessed,” she said, lamenting the entire region’s problem with the most deadly drug in American history. “When you’ve got fentanyl addicts killing our vets… someone’s got to do something.”
