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Ohio woman opens halfway in husband's memory

In a Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 photo, Kim Trent, owner of Trent's Lighthouse, poses for a photo. Trent opened the halfway house after her husband's death, via a drunk driver, motivated her to get sober after 19 years of alcoholism. Using insurance settlement money from her husband's death, Henry-Trent bought a 100-year-old house and opened a halfway house for alcoholic men serious about their recovery. (AP Photo/The Enquirer, Amanda Davidson) MANDATORY CREDIT; NO SALES

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By MARK CURNUTTE, The Associated Press Updated 7:46 PM Monday, February 6, 2012

CINCINNATI — Kim Henry-Trent drank herself to sleep on the night of July 10, 2007. She had agreed to turn herself in the next morning at 9 on a Warren County Common Pleas Court bench warrant.

Brian Trent, her husband of three years, wasn't home. He'd been out with a buddy.

Her cell phone rang several times through the night but she didn't hear it. She awoke at 6 a.m. with her father banging on the door. Police called him when they couldn't reach her.

"Kim, I have really bad news," Ron Henry said. "Something really bad happened to Brian. He's gone. He was killed in a car accident last night."

Her dad drove Henry-Trent to the courthouse in Lebanon and explained to Judge James Heath that her husband had died. Brian Trent's friend lost control of his van and ran into a telephone pole. They'd been drinking.

The judge would not release her. Instead, he threw her into the county lockup. Henry-Trent had failed to appear in court too many times and had a long rap sheet: six DUI convictions before age 24, burglary, petty theft and domestic violence complaints filed by a neighbor. She'd throw beer bottles at her husband in fits of drunken rage.

Henry-Trent didn't believe her husband was dead. She never saw his body. She would sit in a Warren County Jail cell for five months. Health would not let her out to make funeral arrangements. Her husband's family had his body cremated.

For two months, she refused to eat, and the weight on her 5-foot-3 frame plummeted from 120 to 92 pounds. Guards put her on suicide watch.

"My life was over. I wanted to die," said Henry-Trent, now 40. "I hated God with the utmost passion. I hated God because I was alive. I hated God because he took Brian. I hated God because the judge wouldn't let me out."

That she turned her life around is not the most interesting part of her story. It is the suddenness of her religious conversion and the evangelical zeal she brings to helping newly sober alcoholics that stand out.

Using insurance settlement money from her husband's death, Henry-Trent bought a 100-year-old house in Cincinnati in November 2010. Beyond the $9,000 purchase price, she invested another $1,000 — primarily in a large-capacity water heater — and opened a halfway house for alcoholic men serious about their recovery. Ten at a time have found transitional housing there — 60 in all — since she opened.

In honor of her late husband, she named the home Trent's Lighthouse. Its slogan: "A Safe Harbor for Men."

"It's my way to keep him alive," she said.

And a way to help her stay sober.

"It helps me to never forget where I came from and how close that self-created hell is," said Henry-Trent, whose license plate reads "AA IOU 1."

Transitional housing for recovering alcoholics is not a lucrative business. Neither insurance nor Medicaid covers the service. Alcoholics further into their recovery, such as Henry-Trent, are sometimes the ones who care for alcoholics fresh out of in-patient treatment.

The 1,300-square foot house sits atop a short but steep rise on Hamilton Avenue and is easy to miss. She needed a landmark. She found an Amish handcrafted 2-foot miniature lighthouse on the Internet. She placed it in a garden of rocks and flowers near the porch. Solar-powered, it throws a rotating beam of yellow light.

Darkness was all Kim Henry-Trent could see less than five years ago. Short of death, she asked Judge Heath for a long sentence in a state prison.

He might have granted her request if not for the polite but persistent intervention of her father, Ron Henry, now 62.

Henry, of Carlisle, declined to be interviewed but responded via email to one question: Why didn't you walk away, like so many family members understandably do?

"Because she is my daughter. That is how family is, and that's what family is all about. I believed in Kim until she was able to believe in herself."

He visited her weekly. Her mother, Wanda Henry, now 58, couldn't bear the sight of her daughter in jail so Henry-Trent called her collect every day from prison.

"Truly the best friends I could ever ask for," she said.

Ron Henry expressed his belief in his daughter directly to Judge Heath, all the while searching for a rehab program that would accept a woman with a record of violence. He found it in Hamilton County. Talbert House Pathways offered gender-specific substance-abuse treatment for adult female felons in a residential setting with aftercare services.

Heath released her into her father's custody after five months in jail, essentially transferring her to Pathways in South Fairmount. It was Dec. 6, 2007, Ron Henry's 58th birthday.

The change of scenery would not have been possible if not for a spiritual change that took place a months earlier, in September, when she attended a jailhouse Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

At the end of the meeting, a woman from the outside grabbed her hand during the Lord's Prayer.

"She just squeezed my hand harder and harder, and I felt something inside," Henry-Trent said.

Cold chills overcame her. Tears filled her eyes.

"God's wrath," she said, "followed by mercy."

In her cell, as the door slammed, steel on steel, she fell to her knees on the gray concrete floor.

Through a torrent of tears, "I begged God to please forgive me, I begged for God to come into my life and help me."

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