PDF: Tina Loher documents
After weeks of sleepless nights crowded with hallucinations and obsessive fears, Tina Marie Loher packed her two daughters and a .38-caliber handgun into her Ford Escape and drove about 200 miles to her ex-husband’s Signal Mountain chiropractic office, where she shot him.
Loher’s psychiatric evaluation, provided to Hamilton County Criminal Court, shows that, in the weeks leading up to the July 10, 2009, shooting, she was seeing therapists and taking medications for depression, paranoia and both visual and auditory hallucinations. She said she saw a snake slithering up a wall, the evaluation says, and heard female voices calling her name.
Loher also told authorities she wasn’t trying to kill her ex-husband when she shot him – she wanted to create “portals” to release demons that were causing him to torment her and their daughters.
“I didn’t want anybody to die, I just wanted to live,” Loher read Thursday in a statement in Criminal Court. “I thank God nobody was killed that day.”
On Thursday morning, she pleaded guilty to aggravated assault. She originally was charged with attempted first-degree murder. Two counts of reckless endangerment were dismissed as part of the plea agreement.
Loher’s attorney Myrlene Marsa kept a steady hand on the defendant’s back as they listened to Criminal Court Judge Barry Steelman spell out Loher’s charges and legal rights. As Steelman explained the consequences of a guilty plea, he repeatedly looked Loher in the eye and asked if she understood. Each time Loher softly said “yes.”
Steelman gave Loher a three-year sentence but suspended it on the condition that she go to Moccasin Bend Mental Health Institute for treatment. She already has been in the institute for a couple of months following a stint in Silverdale Detention Center.
“I’ve seen a big difference since I’ve gone to Moccasin Bend in how I think and feel,” Loher told the judge.
Steelman said he’d also seen an improvement in her dress, demeanor and eye contact. Moccasin Bend officials will determine when Loher is stable enough to leave the facility, he said.
Her ex-husband, Terry Loher, said Thursday he believed the sentence was too lenient.
“I think there should have been a harder sentence,” he said. “We just hope she has a nice, long stay (at Moccasin Bend).”
He said he has almost healed from the gunshot, which pierced the femoral artery of one leg.
He also said he is pursuing sole custody of their two daughters, Shiloh and Aiyana, who were 5 and 7 years old at the time of the shooting. They waited in the car while their mother went inside his chiropractic clinic with a gun.
“We’re moving to terminate her rights as a parent,” he said. “The girls don’t even ask about her anymore.”
Tina Loher’s father, Kenneth Jones, said he was “very happy” with the ruling.
“We’re going to see that our daughter gets the help she needs,” he said. “And we hope at the end of all this we’ll be able to get her home.”
Tina Loher’s psychiatric evaluation reveals that the frenzied woman who fired the gun at her ex-husband had once been a bright medical student, an intelligent woman with ambition who constantly was hampered by a troubled past and a long battle with mental health problems.
She graduated from high school as salutatorian in 1986 and was voted “most intellectual” and “most likely to succeed.” After college, she attended Boston University of Medicine and dental school at the University of North Carolina, but dropped out of both because of severe depression.
She got into a program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and passed despite another major depressive bout.
While she was at Johns Hopkins, she met Terry Loher, a Navy corpsman, whom she married after graduation. Over the next few years, marital trouble escalated.
They divorced in 2005, at which point a long and bitter custody battle over their two daughters flared up, the evaluation says. Terry Loher sued for custody of the girls, claiming his ex-wife was mentally unstable. She fought the ruling, claiming he was threatening her. They fought over child support.
Both eventually ended up in Tennessee – Terry Loher remarried and started a practice in Signal Mountain, and Tina Loher moved to Eidson, Tenn.
In 2009, the court document said, “Ms. Loher began to have panic attacks, anxiety, and nightmares, fearing her ex-husband was trying to kill her and her children.”
According to the evaluation, Tina Loher said she does not remember much about the actual crime.
“She was unable to recall the actual shooting or anything further until seeing him with their hands intertwined as they fell to the floor,” the evaluation says. “She recalled seeing a black gun in her hand, and him taking it from her and beating her in the face with it.”
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