Kill or Be Killed? (Revisited)

This is obviously no whom done it. It's a why done it.

You've got violent encounter, man inside an apartment, and gun. So, how many shots were fired? Five.

Okay, what is going on here?

Where do I go? Like, where do I do? Your kids are fine. We are completely safe here.

They find this young man lying on his couch with a very close-shot bullet wound to his head. He took out his gun.
He showed me how to load it.

You think I'm doing anything? Like, here it is, here's your chance.

It's pretty unique to have a beloved gymnastics coach of kids and a preschool teacher and stay-at-home mom involved in something like this.

My mother came home and

she woke me and I knew something was off. This appears to be murder.

Anybody reading about it is like, what? She's not at all safe right now.

It's 2.16 in the morning, September 28th.

and there is a red car

stopped at the traffic light.

No one's out. Just this car sitting there.

This officer doing his regular patrol. He sees this vehicle that is at the traffic light.
Probably looks a little bit suspicious. The light is green, blows his air horn.

But the driver does not continue on, and instead,

a very small young woman steps out. I know all your secrets.

She's not wearing shoes. I no longer

live.

She's visibly upset and shaken.

And she just starts spilling this story.

I tried to leave, you wouldn't want me to leave.

I'm not going anywhere. I'm not leaving.

She tells the officer her name is Nicole Atamando. The man at the house is her boyfriend, Chris Grover.
Just take a few deep breaths, okay?

She tells them that he took a gun out. We saw the gun for later.
Okay.

Okay, just you gotta stay with me, okay?

No, you can't hide

your secrets and lies.

Nikki and Chris met pretty innocently. They started out as friends and then according to her they were best friends.

How did Chris and Nikki meet and fall in love? Through gymnastics. He started working at the gym that she worked at.
And it started as a friendship and it developed into something romantic.

My name is Lisa Whalen. Nikki was my daughter's gymnastics coach.

They were both very capable, very talented coaches. Nikki was more the kind, compassionate, mothery side of taking care of the girls.
Chris was more kind of the goofy, joking around with the girls.

He was funny. He was very energetic.
Chris was just the quirky guy, the energy of the group. He loved his gymnastics.
He boasted and was so proud of their accomplishments.

This girl just started doing this when she landed it. He poured himself into that gym.

They had very common interests, strong family values. It really did seem almost like the perfect fit on paper.

Everybody who has ever met Nikki describes her as super sweet, gentle, loves kids, lights up with kids.

His family and her family, they'd lived in the community for a long time, so their families were known.

Chris and Nikki lived in Poughkeepsie, New York. It's about two hours north of Manhattan, far enough away, so it doesn't feel like New York City, but it's not rural either.

The town of Poughkeepsie is a suburban small town. Everybody knows each other.
Everybody's a cousin with somebody or worked with somebody, is married to somebody or brother married to somebody.

People are very friendly, very open.

It's a bigger area, but it has a very small feel to it.

You can be in Poughkeepsie and feel like you're in the city. You can be in Poughkeepsie and feel like you're in the country.

There are so many great restaurants and shops, great schools, a number of colleges as well. It's along the Hudson River, which is beautiful, sparkling river.

It's a really normal, bucolic little river town a few hours outside of Manhattan. Poughkeepsie checked a lot of boxes for Nikki and Chris.
Lots of families, good schools.

Chris was studying cinematography and coaching coaching on the side. Nikki was pursuing her lifelong dream of teaching.
She was pursuing her degree in early childhood education.

Nikki always loved children so much, so it just really seemed like the natural fit for her. Life was good.
Life felt good at the time.

Nikki finds out she's pregnant. She tells Chris and he's over the moon.
He's so sweet, he's so excited. So they move into a little apartment together.

They paint the walls, they get the crib all set up. Chris had a YouTube for a while.
He would post videos of little compilations that he would make of Nikki. It seems like adoration.

Filming her planting flowers, filming her painting their nursery when she was pregnant. It just seemed very romantic and cute.

When Ben was born, she was really over the moon. So in love with Ben and very much a doting mother.

And a little over two years later, Faye came along. So Nikki left teaching to focus on her kids.

Nikki ended up finding community amongst a group of moms. It was a very wholesome kind of feel to that group of moms.

Let's meet up and we'll have a music class that's the babies are shaking the rattles and do that kind of thing. We took our kids for pizza.
They took their kids to go eat healthy smoothie bowls.

When she had her kids, she started making little baby booties and selling those, which were just like expertly crafted. People loved them.
So she posted those a lot on her Instagram.

She was a photographer too. She had like a little photography business for a little while, so she took amazing pictures of her kids.

They were seen as just a really normal young family. It looked like they had this beautiful life, and for many reasons we know that they didn't.

Her story is pretty bizarre because there's just so many questions that are left unanswered. It was just so incomprehensible to me to understand how this could have happened.

I just lost it. I fell to my knees.
It took my breath away. I never expected that's what I was going to hear, ever.

It's the night of September 27th, leading into the early morning of September 28th.

There's a vehicle at a traffic light, and it's not moving. A police car pulls up behind her.
Nikki exits the vehicle. She's got no shoes on.
She's visibly upset and shaking.

I've worked hundreds, if not thousands, of investigations, and I can tell you that even at that point, I might have to take a step back and say, okay, what is going on here?

Keep breath, okay?

Anything? Just one more time, go through the story with me. Is there anybody else in the house that goes

okay?

And she starts spilling this very confusing, kind of disjointed story.

I'm going to be.

Where do I go? Like, what do I do? Your kids are fine. We are completely.

Yeah, we are completely safe here.

It was after 2 a.m. The phone rang.
I was fast asleep. I saw her name.

Immediately grabbed the phone. And the first phrase of hers that I processed was he pulled a gun out of the cab.

And she said, I'm with the police. Here's where I am.
And can you come?

So Elizabeth drives over, heart racing. She pulls into the parking lot, watching all this activity.
Nikki's safe. The kids are safe.
Like,

what's going on now?

You've got kids in the car. These officers are asking her a series of questions, trying to ascertain information

if there's somebody that's in severe medical distress they can be attended to.

Police officers are prepared for basically anything, but this Poughkeepsie police officer is not prepared for what he's about to hear.

He has chosen sound like over.

And you have no idea why you might have. Where's the gun? He's had it.
He's had it.

Out there on the floor. On the floor.

So how many shots were fired?

One. One.

Just like it often is in police work, sometimes a situation can go from zero to 100 in a matter of seconds. And you've got violent encounter, man inside an apartment, and gun.

We don't know at this point that he's not at home with the gun. We don't know that there's not any other people inside the house.
He reached into the couch,

and I need him, and it fell, and I

said,

I will still do.

There will be no light.

Essentially, what they're able to get out of her is she has this violent confrontation with her domestic partner where she knees him in the groin. and he drops the gun.

I grabbed the kids and in the same arms, I put them in the car and I left. And then I fled through the lights, and I was like, I don't think I'm supposed to leave.
I don't know what to do.

After Nikki fled, she called her friend Elizabeth, who's now watching this harrowing scene of Nikki standing with officers while her two children are asleep in the backseat of the car.

So I'm facing that road and just watching all this traffic going by, you know, like shivering in my car,

and

watch an ambulance go.

and eventually watched it come back with no lights on.

And they just weren't giving me any information. They wouldn't let me talk to Nikki.

This is all happening in a very small area. Nikki is at a traffic stop with officers about a half mile from the house where officers are now responding.
And the police station is just a mile away.

So police arrive and remember they don't know what they're dealing with. There's been some sort of domestic dispute that a gun has been fired but they have to consider all possibilities.

If I got a report that the door is open, he's left it on.

Tam, anybody have a rifle on the shield?

This is a very scary situation when you walk into a scene like that.

From the minute that these detectives walk in, they're trying to put pieces together to a gigantic puzzle.

They find a male laying on the couch on his back, and this is Chris Grover, and he suffered one fatal gunshot wound to the left side of his head.

There's a gun laying on the ground, and it's not in slide lock. So that shows you that the gun is still loaded, and there's minimally at least one

bullet inside the chamber.

There's a rug that's kind of pushed out of the way. There's a camera that's on the floor.

They find a shower that's running with a broken computer inside.

Seeing a computer in the bottom of a bathtub is probably a first for every one of these officers that's responded to a murder scene.

At a certain point of the video, even though she knows it already, I think it sinks in and she says, Chris is dead, isn't he?

What do I tell his mom?

Mom!

You're not in any trouble right now, okay? Like I said, is it gonna be a long night for you? Yes, let me go listen to me. Tonight, you need to come out with that, okay? Start from the beginning

because you're not gonna be talking to me all night, okay? You're gonna end up having to talk to one of the techniques.

Nikki's been standing there talking to investigators for nearly two hours. She's still shoeless.
And then we see her carrying her tired kids to a police cruiser.

Her friend Elizabeth, who's been waiting nearby, follows them to the police station.

So certainly a question came in my mind, like, where is Chris? And I know Nikki's alive. Is he alive?

But I didn't know what had happened

until after I had gone to the police station. Nikki came in with the kids.
I and I hugged her

and

they took her.

You know I would like to hear your side of the story and what happened. I wasn't there I don't know.
They gave her every opportunity to explain this.

From the officers at the scene, the story she tells them makes no sense.

This is

you know a serious situation and these things are very complicated and

I would imagine they've never had a case anything like this and they probably still never will after that. Thank God she's finally with the police.

We can finally tell what's happening and then how much she's been in danger. And then realizing the complete opposite of that, she's not at all safe right now.

When the town wakes up, nothing's ever going to be the same.

It's 6 a.m. here in the Hudson Valley.
Good morning. I'm Bobby Welber from WPDH.

Many Hudson Valley residents are in shock after a popular Dutchess County Gymnastics coach, Christopher Grover, was found dead from a gunshot wound early this morning.

When Poughkeepsie wakes up, it's headline-making news. I think it was completely unexpected for most of the community.

29-year-old Nicole Adamondo, Grover's girlfriend, and the mother of his two children, is later taken into custody and questioned by police.

I checked the police bladder every single day. I knew this was going to be a big story for the Hudson Valley.

It's pretty unique to have a beloved gymnastics coach of kids and a preschool teacher and stay-at-home mom involved in something like this.

My mother came home and

she woke me and I knew something was off.

People start turning their phones on and they start having very unexpected calls on their phones, messages, missed missed calls.

Michelle gets a call. They're completely concerned.
Nikki's at the police station.

What was that phone call like when you heard the news? I first knew that the kids were at the police station. Then I knew that Chris was not at the police station with Nikki.

And then I got the call that Chris was dead. It was like, you could have told me literally anything in the world that would have made more sense than that.

Police know that this is going to be a hater. This is going to be all over the news.

You've got a deceased young man who suffered one fatal gunshot wound to the temple. The police have to make sure that they do everything right.

You've probably heard these,

you know, Miranda writes on TV and stuff like that. We watch like crime shows and things.

No, okay. So the first sentence is, you have the right to remain silent.
She was not familiar with how any of this worked.

And so kind of like on a crime show where the person doesn't know what they're doing and you think to the person on the crime show, like, why are you talking? That's what she was doing in real life.

And you got the right to talk to a lawyer and have him or her president with you while you be questioned. Do you understand what that means?

You do look at her and you think, like, get a lawyer. Everybody get a lawyer, but get a lawyer.

You know, I would like to hear your side of the story and tell you you you're fine with talking to us and everything.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Um,

okay.

Two guests came because there was a report that I've been seeing as Bridges for over a long period of time.

Nikki starts out by telling detectives that earlier that same day, Child Protective Services had visited their home to investigate claims made by an anonymous caller.

Someone had made a call to CPS anonymously reporting that they had seen her injured and that they were worried about abuse happening at the home. It's like if you didn't, you need to fix this.

You need to call all your mommy friends, whoever it is, and you need to tell everyone that they need to not say anything, that everything is fine. And I did that.

Someone from CPS came out and interviewed Nikki and Chris separately and they complied with it. Nikki actually stated that there was no violence in the home.
Nikki denied any allegations of abuse.

Nikki stated that there was no weapons inside the house. Chris was also interviewed and at the end of the interview, the CPS worker left.
But Nikki says she lied to CPS.

There was violence in her home. She says she was afraid that if she told the truth to CPS, it would infuriate Chris, a man she already feared.

When the detectives hear CPS investigation, I'm sure that set off a red flag because everyone knows that domestic violence has the tendency to escalate to a situation like this.

King came in and I said, how do you feel today when they interviewed you because I didn't hear that they interviewed? And he was like, it's fine, this is all a big joke.

He took out his gun.

He showed me how to load it.

That you think of doing anything, like, here it is, here's your chance.

But you're not going to do anything.

He loaded it, like, handed me bullets to show me how.

He shows her how to load the gun. Like, he's threatening her with the gun, but let me show you how to use the gun that I've just threatened to kill you with.
After

we've both taken showers, and

then

he

made me have sex on the couch. It wasn't like the usual, like, violent sex.
He was saying, I'm sorry.

Nikki Nikki talks about the fact that the sex that occurred right before the murder wasn't violent. She said that the sex was more gentle than it normally is.

You would think if she was trying to paint him as this offender that she wouldn't have provided that information. He just said he was sorry.
Okay. And he never says he's sorry.

So now I was laying with him on the couch. Okay.

I

was waiting for him to fall asleep. She goes to the room to check on the kids because they're running fevers that night, and then she goes back to the couch and lays down with Chris again.

He pulled it out somewhere.

And

I jumped up and I

knew hard to meet him a little bit, but he like flinched and dropped it and then turned back over to me and said,

you don't have it in you if you're gonna give me the gun and I'll make a couple of us

and your kids want to know one. And then I just

Trigger.

And then what do you do after that?

God, it's loud. Um, I don't know what to do.
I did, I did, like, hung ahead and check his pulse. I didn't see anything I didn't saw blood.

Why is she touching him and checking his pulse? I heard the shower on. I ran in there.
But his computer was in it. Why is a laptop in the shower?

And what is on that laptop that someone in the house wants to get rid of?

And I left

and I picked up the kids and I just ran out of no shoes and

started driving.

That would, in the minds of law enforcement, not be consistent with somebody who's just had to defend their life.

When Nikki tells her story, something in the room shifts at that point. And I think what the detectives were seeing was one big red flag.
Can I like

talk to someone? I feel like I don't know if I'm making sense.

She's realizing that things are going from like I'm explaining what everyone's going to obviously see to

I think I'm being interrogated as somebody who's maybe not truthful. Obviously self-defense, right? And come on.
I mean, I can't make that determination right now.

She's raising this issue of self-defense during the interview. Her head is immediately in a place where she is asserting legal defenses.

She thought, obviously, all I did was protect myself. She's soon going to find out this is not going to go the way that she thought.

To investigators, this does not appear to be self-defense. This appears to be murder.

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The first 48 hours are critical in any investigation, and these investigators have their work cut out for them. This is obviously no who done it because Nikki admitted to doing it.
It's a why done it.

She believed that she killed Chris in self-defense. One of the unique features of every homicide case is your best witness is always dead.

You have to piece together the truth from what isn't probably true.

Nikki's story of that night is bizarre, but consistent. She says there was a history of abuse, that she wanted to leave, but that Chris wouldn't let her.

So police are now wondering, is this a woman fleeing abuse or fleeing the scene of a crime?

The first thing the police do when they arrive at the scene is they do what's called a canvas.

And this is an apartment building. These are neighbors that share walls with this woman.
And none of the neighbors heard or saw anything.

And the crime scene seemed to not quite make sense. There didn't look like there'd been the struggle they wanted.
There wasn't a bloody knife in his hand.

For investigators, it doesn't make sense. They're fighting and they're struggling over a gun, yet he's on his back.

And he says, you're not going to do it. He lets her put the gun next to his temple and pulls the trigger.
That's her story. He's a black belt in Taekwondo.
He's an athletic gymnast.

He's laying there and doesn't fight back, doesn't move.

Investigators are developing a theory that Nikki shot him while he was sleeping because the medical examiner rules that it's a hard contact wound.

Which means she actually put the gun to the side of his head and made contact with it when she pulled the trigger. Was the hard contact wound consistent with Nikki's story? Yes.

But was his position of the body consistent with her story? Absolutely not.

You would expect the body to show you that this altercation or knee to the grain happened.

After she shot him, Nikki says she put the gun down on the ground and checked his pulse. That admission had detectives scratching their heads.

Probably wasn't good for her to admit that she did that because it showed that she didn't attempt to render aid after she shot him.

And that laptop in the bathtub, that was troubling to the police as well. Investigators had found blood on the shower curtains, so they thought maybe she put the laptop there after she shot him.

Even more puzzling, Nikki says she had picked up a bullet casing.

One of the things she says is she leaves the computers there because she doesn't want to tamper with evidence, but she admits taking a bullet casing from the scene, which which is tampering with evidence.

And she's never able to tell police what happened to that shell casing. I grabbed the kids in the same arms I pulled in the car and I was like, I don't think I'm supposed to leave.

I don't know what to do.

All of these strange little details that she's offering up are painting a picture that doesn't look good in the eyes of police, including the fact that she calls her friend and not 911.

Let's say she's in that scenario where she has been forced to pull the trigger in self-defense and defense of her children. The first thing somebody does is they dial 911.

She was fleeing with her kids, and I think that she just totally panicked.

But it's true. She didn't call the cops, and she didn't go to the police station.

The police learned that after CPS interviewed her that morning, Nikki was calling friends and family, asking them to tell CPS that everything was fine. She says Chris told her to make those calls.

But again, detectives see it differently. Can you just walk me backwards through events? Meanwhile, she is semi-frantic and attempting to control the information.
Chris Grover doesn't do any of that.

To detectives, she is behaving like somebody who has something to hide from CPS.

When Forensic searches the couple's phones, a few things stand out. Five weeks prior to the murder, Nikki sent a text out where she references killing Chris.

In one text exchange with a friend, Nikki writes, I haven't figured out how to kill him without being caught, so I'm still here. And then this emoji.

That text exchange is not great for Nikki's story of self-defense. But then investigators find something on Chris's phone from the night of his death that they say is even more suspicious.

Shortly after 11 o'clock, somebody is looking up and trying to get information about what happens when you shoot a sleeping person. And that is hugely significant from the view of law enforcement.

There's two possibilities here. Either Chris was searching for information on how to kill Nikki, or Nikki did that search herself in order to make it look like Chris was going to kill her.

What the investigators in the case see, the computers in the bathtub, the missing shell casing, those searches on the cell phone, which notably had been deleted, and it begins to appear very strongly to police that this is somebody who's doing everything she can not to get caught.

And Nikki is not only arrested, but charged with second-degree murder. But what about those claims of abuse?

Is there something in Nikki and Chris's history that might explain what happened that night? The police start interviewing friends and family and coworkers and neighbors.

They describe Chris Grover as being a normal guy who doesn't get mad. He doesn't raise his voice.

When I first heard the news about everything that happened that night with Nikki and Chris,

I couldn't believe it. I was...

I'm gonna cry. I was devastated.

I was angry.

I wanted her in prison.

And then little trickles of he had been abusing her kind of came out. And I didn't believe it.
I didn't believe a word of it.

Christopher's death was felt not only by his family, but also all the young children that he coached in gymnastics. Nikki's family, her closest friends, certainly Chris's family.

People at the gym, totally shocked. And anybody reading about it is like, what?

But there were a few people who knew a lot more. One of my first things I said was,

Chris was a bad man, and he was hurting her.

People started coming out of the woodwork saying this

was happening. We have proof of this horrific, horrific abuse happening.
And now, for the first time on television, Nikki is sharing her side of the story. I felt paralyzed.
I knew I should leave.

What were you afraid of?

I was afraid he was going to kill me.

Nikki Adamondo has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder. But while sitting in jail, she insisted she had no choice.
She says she shot the father of her two children in self-defense.

I've never been a day without them.

It hurts so bad laying here every day. What if they don't even remember me when they get to see me?

I think any mother

can empathize with that feeling of being ripped away from your children.

Nikki's sister, Michelle, takes in four-year-old Ben and two-year-old Faye and files for custody, still trying to figure out what happened to her sister.

You have truth on your side, and it could have been you.

Yeah, but this was the choice, and now he's still waiting. I'm still not

free.

I'm still not free.

When the news hit, so many witnesses come forward and say, oh, I saw her at the mall and her arm was in a sling. I saw her with this bruise on her face.

A lot of people saw, and a lot of people didn't know what to do. But Nikki's story of abuse doesn't begin and end with Chris.

As the case unfolds, it becomes clear that the full story really begins decades earlier.

Nikki has been one of my closest and dearest best friends for 30 years.

She was like a little vision. This dark hair and these gorgeous long dark eyelashes.
She was exuberant.

She was curious.

And then something happened to her and she like changed overnight when she was five to a really fearful and broken and sad child. And you had a pretty idyllic childhood,

but

there was some dark trauma as well. I was sexually abused at five, along with my best friend.

Me and Nikki endured

horrible things that no children should have to endure. When you're traumatized as a child, it literally changes your brain chemistry.

Nikki carries this secret with her for years, and yet for those around her, she seemed like she was thriving.

She was good at gymnastics. She was a good student.
She never got in trouble.

She meets Chris. He seemed safe.
She felt safe with him. So she told Chris,

look, I had this traumatic experience. He He said, it's okay, like we can go slow.

I trusted him. I told him about what had happened.
Do you remember the first time things got violent? Maybe not the first time, but it was

pretty early on. People started noticing on you bruising and injuries.
When they confronted you with it, what did you say to them?

I just made up an excuse, anything.

I don't have to tell them I walked into a wall or Ben accidentally bumped me with his guitar.

At the gym, I started noticing some things that just did not seem right.

Finger marks on her neck and bruises on her neck. Parents talking that Chris could never do anything like that.
There were many parents saying, what is he doing to her?

One concerned parent brings a very reluctant Nikki to police.

There's actually an investigation and a recorded interview. I want this to end for you.

I want to be able to take care of this for you. I don't remember.
I don't know.

What do you mean, you know?

Nikki is so shut down, she refuses to even name her abuser. When you have a person kicking you, punching you, what are we going to do? Just, okay, yeah, that's all right.
It'll go away.

Absolutely not. I will turn over every rock I have to to find this person, to get this person to stop doing this to you.

That day, Nikki isn't able to bring herself to report Chris, and a few months later, after that interview, she finds out she's pregnant and she says the violence stops

in her telling. He's like the old Chris.

So then she's hopeful and he promises it's going to change.

I didn't see his mini marks for a while,

so I thought, this is it. This baby might save her.

But just six weeks after the baby was born, Nikki says the abuse begins again. She says she's still too afraid to report to authorities, but she does get help from a therapist through victim services.

My name is Sarah Caprioli. I'm a licensed mental health counselor.
Nikki and I worked together.

Nikki was hopeful that at some point he would just grow out of it or that he would just get bored of it and then stop. Unfortunately, that's just not what tends to happen with domestic violence.

Nikki said time and time again, no one will believe me. Everyone loves Chris.

The violence was escalating. She was coming in with more and more injuries, visible marks and bruising, marks on her wrists, clear strangulation marks on her neck.

Nikki's therapist convinces her to have her injuries photographed by a forensic nurse. Some of those photos showed Nikki's most intimate parts.

Nikki says Chris burned her with a hot metal spoon for talking back to him in a disrespectful way.

I did speak with Dutchess County's prosecutors about about options and the evidence that we have, and it did seem like everybody wanted to help, but the roadblock that we kept running into was

we can't do much unless Nikki reports.

When Chris is found dead in 2017, the DA's office of Dutchess County is already familiar with Nikki's name because of these allegations of abuse from prior instances.

So they recuse themselves and pass the case on to the DA's office in Putnam County.

All of those photographs would seem critical evidence now, but the new prosecutors see it differently.

The narrative was, well, nobody has this much documentation.

This must have been manipulated. I believe that that ended up being used against her.

Everything that was documented as abuse is looked at in a different perspective as, oh, this girl was plotting this murder. Everything that she had to show that she was abused was flipped.

She was turned into a villain at trial. If you didn't believe the allegations of the violence, you weren't going to believe Nikki.
I thought, surely people are going to see.

They're going to see the evidence. How did you feel going into the trial? Sick.
Felt sick.

What were you afraid of? Somebody's going to kill me.

If Nikki was the one who died that night, it would have barely been a story. If it would have just been boyfriend kills girlfriend, the end.

What

actually happened, I think only two people know what happened, and one of those people aren't around anymore to tell us.

Nikki is charged with second-degree murder and is now facing 25 years to life in prison. We know who pulled the trigger.
The question is why.

Why today? Why did you decide to kill him today? We have proof of this horrific, horrific abuse. She begins to suspect that he might be putting her on horror sites.
Basically, her worst nightmare.

Some of those images that you saw, you can't unsee. Never.

Pretty much painted this narrative that Nikki was the puppet master that had been weaving this web of lies, all to culminate in the event of killing her partner to get away with it.

The authorities saw it as murder.

What did you see it as? This killer be killed.

My name is Justine Vanderloon. I'm an independent journalist and I spent several years investigating the Nikki Adamondo case.
I know all your secrets.

I started to read some Poughkeepsie Journal articles. You could see these headlines.
A local gymnastics coach was killed. His girlfriend pulled the trigger.

Ahead of time, it seems like nobody knew what was happening. Or does it seem like everybody had a suspicion, but nobody wanted to believe it?

But that's the nature of domestic violence. It's silence and secrecy.
Secrets and minds.

Good morning, it's 6 a.m. I'm Bobby Welver and here's what's trending at wpdh.com.

It was one of those stories that really just divided the Hudson Valley.

Both sides were writing into us, calling us here at the radio station to be pretty adamant about whatever side that they were on, that their person was in the right and the other person was 100% in the wrong.

Just as for Chris, they were supporting Chris's family. They put on their red and their black.
They didn't believe that he was who people were saying he was.

I reached out to his mother and offered my condolences. I'm so sorry.
No one deserved this. You know, Chris was wonderful.
And she responded, Nikki was a monster. My son deserves to be alive.

We have gathered stars, support, and our love for Nikki. We believed she was being unjustly held.
We decided we would wear purple, which is the color of domestic violence awareness.

And that became our color to represent our efforts and our advocacy on Nikki's behalf. Our community rallied together to post a $600,000 bond.
We were able to get her out on bail

right before Christmas that year.

So a year and a half after Chris's death, Nikki Atamando is charged with second-degree murder. She's heading to trial and she's potentially facing 25 years to life.

Supporters have gathered at the courthouse from both sides for Nicola Damondo's highly anticipated trial. The courtroom was packed every day.

Everybody would just come in, take their seats, red and black side, and the purple side.

In front of this packed courtroom, you have Nikki and her lawyers and the prosecution team led by Hannah Krauss.

Their job is to convince the jury that Nikki pulling the trigger was not justified and that her story story of self-defense is fiction. The prosecution's case was that Nikki was a master manipulator.

She wasn't who she seemed. She wasn't a kind, sweet person.
And she made a cold calculated decision to murder Chris Grover on the night of this incident.

The pictures at trial that the prosecution put forward were of him in a tutu and being this playful, fun-loving person.

So he was a nice guy and a good gymnastics coach. So therefore he could not have been an abuser.
Therefore Nikki could not have been abused.

Just because she claimed to be a victim of domestic violence doesn't mean that she's necessarily timid and doesn't talk back to him.

To prosecutors, Nikki could be confrontational with Chris when she wanted to be.

In at least one heated text exchange, Nikki uses expletives and insults to describe Chris, suggesting that at least some of her text messages, she's not always afraid of them.

One of the prosecution's key pieces of evidence was that text message that Nikki sent her friend five weeks before she shot Chris.

I had to testify in court about this statement. What the prosecution ever asked me was, were you scared for Chris? Were you worried that Nikki was going to do this?

No.

It was nothing. There was nothing to it.
If you're you're really involved in a major conspiracy to commit an intentional homicide, do you really end it with an emoji? I think not.

Next for prosecutors, those deleted internet searches on Chris's phone from the night he died.

Although these searches were conducted on Chris's phone, the prosecution contended very forcefully that Nikki Adamondo was the one that was actually doing the internet searches.

There was no evidence of any connection of DNA or anything else of Nikki on that phone.

There's also that laptop that was found on the bathtub. For prosecutors, that's another example of Nikki trying to cover her tracks.

They say attempting to destroy any evidence that she thinks might be on it. The prosecutors also pointed to the medical examiner's report that suggested that Chris was shot at close range.

In the medical examiner's report, you see the phrase contact wound, which from the prosecution's standpoint is consistent with Chris Grover being asleep on the couch.

Because if he's awake, the argument would be why on earth would he allow her to place a gun to his temple and pull the trigger.

But the Dutchess County medical examiner conceded during the trial that there was no way for her to conclude one way or the other whether Mr. Grover was asleep at the time.

During the trial, the prosecutor painted you as a manipulator, as a liar, as somebody who was acting.

I still hear her voice every day.

The experience in the courtroom was

just as traumatizing as

living with him for years.

The defense's case was that it was self-defense, that in that moment she was in imminent danger, that she feared for her life.

The volume of corroborative evidence that we had, which documented Nikki's abuse,

that's highly unusual.

We had medical professionals who testified to the actual physical injuries to her body that really can't be contradicted.

The prosecution's point of view is what you're seeing in these photographs is self-inflicted, or it's from accidents that had nothing to do with Chris Crow.

But when it's the defense's turn to make their case, they offer evidence that they believe helps to explain why Nikki pulled the trigger that night.

One day, while they were in the bedroom, Nikki noticed a red flashing light. This is basically her worst nightmare.
Anybody on the internet could find these unbelievably horrific pictures.

You described that as something with a breaking point.

It just brought like a whole new level of

shame.

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The trial of Nicole and Amondo now in its second week of testimony at the Dutchess County Courthouse.

Free on bond now for three months, Nikki's juggling long days in court, all while parenting now six-year-old Ben and four-year-old Faye in the evenings.

After a week of testimony, painting her as a manipulative murderer, it's time for her to tell her story.

What made you want to testify in the trial? Silence didn't serve me well, and

it was time to speak. I had to.
The truth is worth fighting for.

Nikki needs jurors to believe that the years she says she suffered at the hands of an abusive partner caused her to feel the threat from Chris was imminent.

This was more than a murder trial and if you did not look at it through a lens of understanding domestic violence, you would get it wrong.

We don't understand the psychological warfare that has happened to victims.

You were afraid you wouldn't be believed.

Because he was so loved and

he said nobody would believe me. I was afraid that if I moved forward, nothing would happen, or very little, and that it would be more dangerous when he came back.

I stayed as long as I did, trying to keep us all together until I couldn't anymore.

She loved his parents, and she wanted her children to have that, you know, warm,

extended family.

They had no idea what was going on. So

she was putting on a show.

My pregnancy with Faye and Chris's violence

increased as it went on. I loved being pregnant.
I loved...

But

that pregnancy with Faye was tough. That pregnancy was really tough.

I was in constant pain. in trying to care for a toddler and

being pregnant or a newborn after she was born. He wouldn't stop.
It just kept getting worse. What were you afraid of?

I was afraid he was going to kill me.

On the stand, Nikki testifies that in 2015, two years before Chris is found dead, she made a stunning discovery.

One day, while they were having sex in the bedroom, Nikki noticed a red flashing light. She discovered that he had been secretly recording without her knowledge or consent.

She begins to suspect that he might be putting her on porn sites, which is basically her worst nightmare.

Nikki says that her boyfriend, Chris Grover, took images of her without her consent and tells the jury that she discovers these same images had been posted on Pornhub under the username Grover Respect,

even though the website says they forbid any content involving force or coercion. Most of the images of Nikki are too graphic to show on national television.

Somebody with the username Grover Respect was uploading non-consensual photos of Nikki to Pornhub. This user was very interested in degrading women and in having power over women.

There was at least one video Gabrier did featuring a gymnast, which I also found to be pretty disturbing.

It was like a nightmare. You described that to your therapist as something of a breaking point.
I felt paralyzed. I knew I should leave

to have it filmed and broadcast. It just brought like a whole new level of shame and

it was painful.

Nikki tells drors that her therapist set up a meeting with detectives to report these images on Pornhub.

Nikki did allow the detective to come in and talk to her about options and he also gave us a deposition form where she could write down

what had been happening.

The police said just sign this and I'll go arrest him right now at the gym.

And when he said that all I pictured were all the girls that he coached and what that would do for them to know that this man that they trusted and loved was capable of doing what he was doing.

It made me want to hide it even more.

And I felt like it was just my word against his. He said that he would just tell people I liked it.

So you had the paper in front of you that you could have signed. I think people might not understand

that thinking.

When you were in survival mode, the thought of signing that piece of paper felt so dangerous.

She has a baby at home. She has a toddler at home.
This is their dad.

Nikki is a signature away from having Chris arrested, but she is unable to bring herself to do it. The detective sent out a department-wide email saying Nikki is the victim.

He said that Chris Grover is the person he believes responsible. What they're saying here is we believe this woman is at risk.

But at trial, the question becomes who posted those images.

Chris isn't visible in any of the photos or videos, and neither the prosecution nor the defense is able to directly link the account to Chris or anyone else.

So the judge blocks jurors from seeing any of Grover Respect's profile or activity on Pornhub. The jurors do see those graphic images of Nikki.

Now to counter that, the prosecution's strategy is to say, well, maybe it's consensual. Prosecution used narratives to destroy somebody as a victim and turn them into a master manipulator.

But which narrative will stick with the jury? A victim of years of horrific abuse, forced to choose life or death?

Or someone who methodically portrayed her partner as an abuser to get away with murder.

We knew that the verdict could come down any moment. Everybody rushed to the court from sheer adrenaline, no idea what's going to happen.

The days that she was testifying, knowing she was like saying the things that she had kept hidden for so many years, with images that she had desperately tried to hide just on huge screens in front of his family, our family, friends, and doing the hardest work she's ever had to do.

She rose to the occasion and said, okay, I'm going to fight for my life and I'm going to fight for my kids' lives.

In addition to telling jurors about the years of abuse she says she endured, Nikki needs to convince them that on the night in question, she believes she had no choice but but to do what she did.

The authorities saw it as murder. What did you see it as?

Survival.

I wish

every day

that that night ended differently.

But the truth is in that moment

it was survival. It was killer be killed.
And

I still can't wrap my head around the fact that I was capable of something like that.

The prosecution's position on this was even if Chris Grover was abusive, Nikki Adamondo had no legal right to shoot him in the head as he lay on the couch. She has a clear path to the door.

She's the one that's got the gun. We need to understand

that it is quite possible the person holding the gun is far more afraid than the person not holding the gun, and that matters. That danger, risk, and lethality are always imminent for a victim.

In your mind, you didn't have a choice? He was so much faster and stronger than me.

There was no way.

But would the jury believe that? After three weeks of testimony, the case was in their hands.

It's April 12, 2019, and we've learned a verdict is expected in the Nicole Atomondo trial.

Jury came back and found Nikki Atamando guilty of second-degree murder. For Nikki, it was the worst possible verdict.

I just remember reaching behind my neck and taking off my locket that I wore. I had pictures of my kids in it and putting it on the table

so that

they wouldn't take it.

The jury came back and vindicated Chris and they vindicated the family. Justice served.
Here's his ashes.

We are heartbroken and devastated

and that we are thinking of Nikki's two children, Ben and Pei, who will go to sleep without, tonight without their mom.

As Nikki's waiting to be sentenced in a prison cell, her guilty verdict to domestic violence advocates represents exactly what's wrong with our criminal justice system and how domestic violence cases are prosecuted.

Criminalized survivors, I think, is a term that has been used to describe people like Nikki,

where they take acts to survive and end up being just one more defendant in a criminal justice system that doesn't seem to understand domestic violence.

In Miss Aramando's case, there was lots of focus on the night of the incident and very little focus on how we got there. I thought to myself, if Ms.

Adamando was not seen as a victim, then who could be seen as a victim? If Nikki was the one who died that night, it would have barely been a story. What do you mean a story?

They wouldn't have even bothered to come up with a narrative. It would have just been boyfriend kills girlfriend, the end.

This is a very emotional issue for a lot of people, and that's exactly why we have trials.

It's the jury's job to make the call.

A Hudson Valley woman convicted of murdering the father of her children hopes to be sentenced under a new law.

Just one month after Nikki was found guilty, New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act.

It gave courts discretion in sentencing crimes involving domestic violence survivors if the abuse was a significant contributing factor to the defendant's criminal behavior.

The act was made for cases just like Nikki's. It's clear that the abuse was a material cause of the crime for which he was convicted.
Nikki is facing 25 25 years to life in prison.

Now under the new law, that could be reduced to as little as five years. Her case is among the very first to test the new law.

After a three-day hearing and months of waiting, Nikki Adamondo is once again facing the Duchess County Court, awaiting her fate.

The court found that she didn't qualify under the law.

The court was unconvinced by Nikki Adamondo's contentions that Chris Grover was abusing her.

She was sentenced to 19 years to life in York State Prison.

19 years to life is unimaginable

in the life of a mother. Even if you started when your child was a baby, their whole childhood is gone.

The judge stated, quote, someone who made the choices you did is a broken person.

It was upside down to hear the judge tell her her that she was a broken person when it was clearly the system that was broken.

Part of the judge's reasoning is that Nikki, to his mind, had, quote, a tremendous amount of advice, assistance, support, and opportunities to escape her alleged abusive situation.

The number one question that I am asked all the time is, why don't they just leave? And it is an extremely simplistic and really archaic

look at domestic violence. When somebody says, why didn't you leave?

What do you say?

I was scared what would happen after that.

I was scared to die and leave my kids without me.

But I also thought

that if I could make him happy, it would stop war.

That things would go back to how they were.

After her sentence, Nikki's supporters refused to give up, and her lawyers file an appeal insisting there was important evidence the jurors never saw. There was a lot that the jury didn't get to see.

I think a lot of people are under the assumption that the truth comes out at trial.

Nikki's army of supporters is now growing, and she's about to gain a new supporter, a powerful legal ally determined to help her. I promised my kids I wouldn't stop fighting until I came home.

I never let myself accept that it was the end.

Nikki's supporters are now a movement.

And they're outraged, stunned by her fate. 19 years to life in prison.

Nikki's sister is still taking care of the kids while Nikki is sent to Bedford Hills correctional facility. I went there to ask about her experience and that fateful night.

You're gonna sit here. That's okay.

Take a deep breath. We're gonna take a minute.
You all right?

I think there's a misunderstanding about

victim and perpetrator. I think it's hard

to understand

that someone can be be both.

I know that your kids come to visit you weekly. What are those visits like?

It's all we have right now, you know?

They're really bittersweet,

but they're really resilient and spend five years of that now, so they're kind of used to it, I think. Yeah.
What do you do on those visits?

We

sing too loudly for the visiting room, probably.

They tell me about their day. We try to just, we play games even during COVID, six feet apart.
We'd be playing hand games across the table.

Just try to soak up as much time as we can.

How hard is it to parent behind bars?

It takes intention and effort,

but it would be harder not to.

Happy birthday,

dear

mommy.

Mama said you could come back home. That's what I wish too.
But I talk to them every day, and I know who they sit next to in class.

I try to stay involved to their day-to-day. Those are the little moments that I miss most.

Chris's parents, what's your message to them?

I wish that I could explain to them how much I share in their hurt, how much I grieve Chris too,

and how much I never wanted to cause pain. And I know that I've caused so much pain in their lives.

What would you change if you could rewind the clock?

I don't know. I think about that all the time.

A big thing that Nikki did was comforted herself thinking that her kids weren't seeing that abuse. At least her kids weren't a part of this.

I don't know how I thought that I was protecting them by staying. I really believed that.

I think if she had known earlier that the abuse was affecting the kids, it may have changed the trajectory of things.

In 2018, while Nikki was awaiting trial at the Dutchess County Jail, her children, Ben and Faye, five and three at that time, started to meet with a clinical psychologist, Dr. David Crenshaw.

The children were sentenced as well as their mother because it sealed their fate for the next number of years. There's over five million kids in this situation in the United States.

This is not a unusual circumstance. It became clear as Dr.
Crenshaw worked with them that they knew what was happening.

When they first would be reunited with her in the room, they would want to check her for bruises and cuts.

And they would do that in places like her arms, her hands, but they would also want to check under her clothing, on her chest, because she would try to hide the bruises and the cuts. That, in my mind,

just simply validated everything that Nikki had testified to on the stand.

After Nikki was found guilty, a partner at the prestigious New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell decides to take on her case pro bono.

Nikki's case encapsulates everything's wrong about the way society addresses survivors of domestic violence and certainly with the way we treat them in the criminal justice system.

Garrett Beany is convinced that Nikki should never have been convicted of second-degree murder and he prepares to file an appeal on her behalf.

There There were so many things that were not presented in the trial, things that were not allowed.

Why?

So the prosecution obviously had to paint Nikki as a liar and paint Grover as the saint. They did everything they could to do that, including excluding powerful evidence.

And the judge in this case, in excluding that information, took away from the jury something they should have known about.

Remember, jurors saw the images of Nikki from the Grover Respect Pornhub account, but not the user profile information.

Her appellate attorney contends that jurors should have been allowed to see the profile and decide for themselves who posted those images of Nikki. Grover Respect

described himself in terms of age and interests that fit Grover to a T.

If the jury had heard that, it would have made them, I think, at least question the pictures that were being painted of Nikki and her abuser during the course of the trial.

But the ultimate question is, on that night, was Nikki Adamondo justified in using deadly force against Chris Grover?

According to Garrett Beaney, he and his team have put in over 4,000 hours of pro bono work preparing to present Nikki's case to the Court of Appeals.

Nikki believed, I think until the final verdict,

that all she had to do was to explain what happened and that someone would believe her.

So what will the Court of Appeals do?

And will Nikki be believed?

She said, check your social media about Nikki. Jump scrolling.
I'm like,

oh my gosh.

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It's April 2021 and Nikki's lawyer is on a Zoom with the Supreme Court's appellate division. Garrett Beani, on behalf of appellant Nicole Adamondo.
Ms.

Adamondo has not received the fairness and justice our system provides. Someone finally looked at the evidence and said, oh my god, this was a woman that was horribly abused.

This is a very sad and tragic historical narrative.

The Court of Appeals did not have too much difficulty in unanimously concluding that the nature and extent of the abuse was not undetermined and then that a typical sentence under the criminal code was unjust.

Yesterday, a New York Appeals Court determined she should have been sentenced under the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act and her sentence was reduced.

Nikki's sentence goes from 19 years to life down to seven and a half. As of now, she's served six years of that.

Getting the news that the appellate court had actually offered relief in reducing Nikki's sentence really did feel like a small miracle because what they said was the judge was wrong. She was abused.

I felt found finally

by them and heard. How did you tell your kids? Ben had Skittles, so I opened them up and I lined up 19 Skittles.

on the table and I let them know that that's how many years the judge wanted mommy to stay here. And then I removed some of them and showed them this is how long mommy has left.

It gave them something concrete to hold on to,

that I would be coming home.

They did reduce her sentence, but they did not reverse her murder conviction.

We reached out to Chris Grover's family and although they declined to do an interview, his mother Gail shared this with us.

We were very happy with the prosecution in this case and believe the jurors reached the right verdict. The appellate court's decision was a slap in the face.

We believe Nikki's accusations of abuse are untrue and maintain Chris was a peaceful, loving partner and father.

You could see why some people would think, well, you took a human life, you had your sentence reduced, that that's what criminal justice should look like.

There's nothing I can do to change what happened,

to bring him back, to

heal

the collective pain from all of this.

Staying in here

causes more pain.

In the wake of Nikki's appellate win, a lot of people are beginning to see her in a different light, including Chris Grover's ex-girlfriend, Bella.

So I definitely romanticized my relationship with Chris.

It wasn't until I started experiencing my own physically abusive relationship to where I was even able to look back and there were some red flags there.

Bella says Chris never abused her, but she says her own experience made her change her perspective. There was a time that Chris was upset with me.

I was just standing over the side of my bed, folding my laundry, and I looked up and I just saw Chris in my window. He was just watching me as a teenage kid.

My thought was, I feel bad because he is so worried that I'm going to betray him that he feels the need to watch me.

Hindsight being 2020, I can look back now and say that's stalking and that's scary.

So my ex-boyfriend was shot in the head and killed by his girlfriend and mother of their children in September of 2017. And justice was not served in that case, and I wanna discuss it.

If I could say anything to her, it would be that I'm sorry.

I'm sorry for her experience, and I'm sorry that I didn't believe her. There's an open clemency application.
If you go to that Instagram, you can get to it.

Instead of getting out when her kids are young adults, Nikki is now set to be released in 2024. It's still not enough.
It's still not right. She should not have been there for one day.

Thank you so much for being here.

Nikki's supporters now have a renewed mission to get her home even before that new release date. And there's only one person who can make that happen.
The governor of New York, Kathy Hokul.

I think that Governor Hokul has a wonderful opportunity right now to show the rest of the country how New York State treats survivors of domestic violence. Nikki does not deserve to be incarcerated.

Her children don't deserve to be separated from their mother. But Nikki's case is not just about Nikki.
It's about all survivors.

Nikki's story has rightfully gotten an immense amount of attention, but there are people with equally worthy stories out there. And some of these stories are also getting media attention.

Piper Lewis waiting to hear her sentencing for killing her alleged rapist. Wendy Howard claims she killed in self-defense.

Along Madison George, a Colville tribal member, will serve in prison for killing a man she says raped her. Bristol Kaiser, an appeals court ruled, can now make the case.

Here's behind bars for the murder of her ex-fiancé. There's new hope tonight for April Wilkins.

And there are countless stories of survivors that never see the media spotlight.

When I started looking into Nikki's case, I was curious if this was a one-off or if it was something that was happening all the time. So I started to write into prisons.

One of the letters I received was from Tanisha Williams. She took part in a really horrible crime while her abuser had a gun to her.

She was used as a key prosecution witness and then she was put away for 30 years. Why did you think that if you came forward with your story, you would get to go free? You would not go to prison.

I just thought them knowing I'm giving everything from everything that happened to me, what he did to me, giving everybody what they need. I would not be in prison.

She had no money and she had no way out because she took a plea, so she could never appeal it. She's in Michigan, and she has a clemency petition too.

She has a clemency application on Governor Gretchen Whitmer's desk. What would you say to Governor Cochold that you deserve clemency? I desperately feel the weight to empower other survivors

before it's too late, before they end up

where I am.

Or worse, I just feel that responsibility.

Nikki's file is one of so many sitting on the governor's desk, many of whom are domestic violence survivors.

But amongst the hundreds of letters of support that Nikki has, there's one very loud letter saying the opposite.

In their letter to the governor's office, opposing Nikki Adamondo's application for clemency, the district attorney wrote the following: Miss Adamondo was not the victim of sexual or physical abuse by Christopher Grover.

To the contrary, she is a masterful manipulator who intentionally murdered Chris Grover in his sleep. But will the governor see it the same way? That will be up to her.

Nikki Atamando is convicted of killing her partner, but she's always maintained it was self-defense and responding to years of abuse. Juju Chang is here.
She's been following the story.

Good morning, Juju. Good morning to you, George.
You know, Nikki Atamando's life seemed picture-perfect.

I've reported on Nikki Atamando's case for more than a year now, and every holiday she and her supporters have asked the governor of New York to bring her home to her kids.

But when the list of names for clemency was announced last December, Nikki's was not one of them.

Her supporters are frustrated, but that doesn't stop them. In fact, their numbers have grown and they're expanding their reach, advocating for other criminalized survivors across the country.

Why do you think so many women are dedicated to her cause? I think a lot of women see themselves in Nikki.

Nikki is just one of many. It's just she's having more eyes on her than most of them have.

So much of what happened to Nikki is so much of what's happening to other survivors of domestic violence.

When considering whether or not Nikki Adamando is a criminalized survivor of domestic abuse, even if we take everything she said as true, the prosecution would still argue that she shot a man who was apparently asleep on a couch.

There's this phrase that the punishment should fit the crime. What do you think about your punishment?

Even with a reduced sentence, even had I been acquitted, I'll live with this for the rest of my life. Knowing the pain that I've caused so many people,

playing over and over again all the things that I did and that I didn't do, I can't change that now.

What would you say to other women who might be in a position like yours?

Tell them that I see them and I hear them and someone will believe them.

We have not figured out how we create a system

that addresses better domestic violence, which is a scourge in this country.

Of course, the best ending is where no one dies, and we clearly haven't figured out a way to make that happen as a society. When you daydream about leaving this place, what does that look like to you?

Just being with my kids and helping them find a new normal for our life. You tell them good stories about their dad.
And they hold on to it. They try to keep those parts of him alive for them.

He was loved, and I loved him too.

Nikki's two children, now 10 and 8, continue to live with her sister, and they see Chris's parents regularly.

Nikki's currently set to be released sometime in 2024, but her clemency application remains open with New York's Governor Hochul. That is our program for tonight.
Thank you for watching.

I'm David Muir, and from all of us here at 2020 and ABC News, good night.