I would hope that I would have left a person long before it escalated into a situation like that. Geesh!

Thankfully nobody has ever tried to kill me before is all I can say.
And leave your child in a psychopath's custody?
Did you not know this person was a psychopath before you impregnated her?
As I said, she only freaked out when we got to Pittsburgh. She was a young girl who had never been out of Lewiston, Idaho where we grew up. That's a town of maybe 24,000 back then. She was from a poor family. The furthest she had ever gone was Spokane, Washington about two hours away. Spokane was her idea of a big city. Now take that girl who had just given birth at 19 years old and drag her 2,000 miles across the country and put her in ******* Pittsburgh and make her a mother and a wife. You want to talk about culture shock? No wonder she flipped out.
What? I was a 16-year-old mother. Give me a ******* break.
And when you were a 16 year old mother did you get taken from your home and put from one culture tootally different culture? There's a bit of a difference in culture between west-coast, small town Lewiston, Idaho and east-coast big city Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Were you taken from all your friends and family? Were you dragged from a town of 24,000 into a city of 2 million with a totally different attitude and no one to help you manage the transition?
I don't blame her for freaking out. I don't blame her at all. I completely understand. But my understanding didn't solve the problem or eliminate the threat.