For Cobb District Attorney Flynn Broady Jr., the county’s new Family Advocacy Center is personal.
“When I was 10 years old, I had probably lived through seven or eight years of my father victimizing my mother,” Broady said.
Broady recounted his experiences with domestic violence as he shared an update about the county’s new center for victims of domestic violence at a meeting of the South Cobb Area Council of the Cobb Chamber of Commerce this week.
His remarks echoed those he made last month in his successful bid to win funding for the building from the Board of Commissioners, talking about defending his mother from his father with a baseball bat, and learning along the way what it means to be a loving, caring spouse.
Janet Paulsen, a member of the Georgia Commission on Family Violence and herself a survivor of domestic violence, was in attendance at the meeting. Broady featured her story as an example of why the center is necessary.
In 2015, Paulsen’s husband shot her six times after she told him she wanted a divorce, leaving her wheelchair-bound.
“One of the main reasons that this is so important is that it’s going to give victims a roadmap of what you need to do next, because I had no clue what I was doing,” Paulsen said. ” … Even though we thought we had, my parents and I, a good plan, he still shot me. So I don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”
Located at 277 Fairground Street in Marietta, the center is intended to serve as a one-stop-shop of services for victims of sexual assault, child abuse, elder and dependent adult abuse, human trafficking and stalking.
Kim McCoy, director of the DA’s victim witness unit, said the movement for justice centers, as family advocacy centers are also known, grew out of the fight against domestic violence. However, they have expanded to offer services to more than just victims of domestic abuse.
The idea for a center in Cobb originated in the late 1990s, when McCoy and other county officials visited one in San Diego and decided to bring the concept to Georgia.
She and others had to ruminate on that idea for two decades.
“We just didn’t have the resources, it just wasn’t our time,” McCoy said.
Broady credited McCoy with bringing the idea of the center to Cobb, and he also credited his predecessor, former District Attorney Joyette Holmes, with securing $400,000 in grants from the state in 2019 to get the idea off the ground.
It was a slog to get further funding from the commission— Broady initially requested $1.4 million in January, though he was ultimately able to secure just a third of that last month to get the center up and running.
Even so, Broady and his staff celebrated the building’s dedication in December, and the center is now on track to open this summer.
At that dedication, Broady told the MDJ his office was at work setting up a 501(c)(3) nonprofit for community members and businesses to support the center. AikWah Leow, spokesperson for the DA’s office, said the application for the nonprofit is in the works.
For McCoy, it’s special to see a center 25 years in the making come to fruition.
“It’s indescribable,” McCoy said. “It is such a need for victims of crime … It is going to be a gamechanger for victims.”