My heart broke Wednesday when I read the police report from Chief Jeff Hinton — a woman whose jaw was broken, allegedly by her boyfriend.

I don’t know these folks and especially, if the allegations are true, don’t want to know him.

Maybe some of it was her fault, I don’t know. Even it was, there was no reason for this man to allegedly do what he did to her.

I look at these so called tough guys, bad boys, whatever, and shake my head, I shake my head at the women who are so attracted to them because one day their fatal attraction could mean the end of their life.

I remember when I was working for the Daily Herald and receiving a message early one Saturday morning. Without looking up the date, I can’t remember the year, not too long ago.

The message was from one of my sources and was something like this, “If we’re up, you need to be up.”

I returned the call and found out the situation and went to Weldon, a woman was fatally beaten on the railroad tracks by her boyfriend. It took a shot from a deputy to get him off of her. He survived. She did not.

I talked with the woman’s mother that day, trying to hold back the tears myself at something so horrible, so wrong, so undeserved and what the mother said was simple but poignant, something like, “She chose the wrong man.”

She said family members tried to tell her this was the wrong man but she didn’t listen, at least not until it was too late and his anger so built up that he did the only thing abusers know how to do: Hurt.

It was a somber day for me, thinking of past girlfriends, one who went through it before.

I remember one night he came into town, found out where I lived and kept calling me to come down. She was with me and I chose not to, not that I couldn’t handle myself if I did. I’ve been in two fights in my life and they were enough. I didn’t want to stoop to his level and he finally left.

I will never understand this fatal attraction women have. Some say it’s a problem that requires counseling, that good guys like I consider myself, can’t save the ones like my former girlfriend who did end up surviving, not just with me.

I’m not casting stereotypes because I have close friends who are inked and pierced because it’s part of their personal expression, men who would never think of beating love into their women.

I believe sometimes, however, it is only done to cover up a weakness, a weakness for beating women they claim they love.

Many abusers aren’t even inked, many don’t even have this bad boy image. I think, and I could be wrong, it goes back to the way they have been raised and think in many ways the women who are attracted to them are products of the same environment, a desire to have a man like their father or other male family member who happened to be an abuser. I don’t know. It’s something I’ll never understand.

The one thing I do understand is this isn’t love and it took the man who fatally beat his girlfriend on the railroad tracks to understand this.

As he was rolled in a wheelchair from a first court appearance one day, I asked him why.

“I loved her,” he said.

This isn’t love, I thought — Lance Martin