An Oklahoma woman has been arrested and accused of shooting her husband dead while he slept, Oklahoma police say. Salomi Derena Ochsner, 63, faces one count of first-degree murder in the death of 63-year-old Jeff Ochsner. The shooting happened early in the morning at a home on East West County Road in Chattanooga.
At about 5:35 a.m. on Oct. 30, the suspect called Tillman County 911 to report “she had just shot and killed her husband of 40 years,” according to an affidavit of probable cause. The charging document combines the account of the county sheriff’s office with that of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.
Investigators say the woman pointed to a domestic violence incident the night before as the reason for her actions.
“Salomi told dispatch that Jeff had ‘beat her head in last night’ [and] ‘he was going to kill her’ and that she had lost consciousness and that it was her life or his,” the affidavit reads. “She needed an ambulance, and needed stitches because her head was bleeding.”
Authorities reached the home around 7 a.m. and found the man “laying face up, on his back, on the floor of a bedroom,” near a “pool of blood” on the bed, according to the charging document.
“Jeff had no signs of life and was blue in color,” the affidavit goes on.
Officers also noted that the woman had “a laceration on the left side of her head, approximately 3.5 inches long, above her left eye, just below her hair line,” the affidavit states. She was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, cleared, and then brought to the Tillman County Law Enforcement Center.
At the sheriff’s office, she waived her Miranda rights and agreed to speak with investigators, the charging document says. She allegedly told them that she was lying in bed the previous evening when her husband “arrived home from hunting and dragged her out of bed and threw her to floor” at about 6:30 or 7 p.m.
“Jeff then grabbed her by the hair and began slamming her head into the floor, multiple times, causing the laceration and her head began bleeding,” the affidavit continues. “[She] did not think she lost consciousness. Jeff then got off of her and sat in the living room and watched TV.”
According to the charging document, she estimated that she stayed on the floor for about two hours before cleaning up her own blood and going to sleep around 8:30 p.m.
Police said she woke early the next morning. At approximately 5:30 a.m., she went to the bedroom where her husband was sleeping and took a .38 Special revolver “from the side of the bed,” the affidavit says.
“Jeff was laying face down in the bed,” the charging document goes on. “She stood at the foot of the bed and shot Jeff. He then rolled and fell to the floor, onto his back. She observed he was still breathing and shot him approximately one or two more times.”
She is being held at the Tillman County jail on a $200,000 bond.