Ohio woman opens halfway in husband's memory

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."