On the morning of July 19, 2019, Kimberly Tejada's life changed radically after an attack at the hands of the person she considered the love of her life.
According to Tejada, her boyfriend, Brian Cruz, began striking her with a hammer while she slept in the home they shared in Glendale.
"My mom said she heard screaming, like if someone was trying to kill me," Tejada recounts. "Her room was just next to ours, she went into the room and saw what was happening."
Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.
Her mother said she witnessed Cruz attacking Tejada. She stepped in, trying to defend her, but ended up with a head wound. The suspect fled and left the weapon behind.
Tejada survived the attack with severe injuries to her head, including a fractured skull and facial bones. The young woman, who was 24 at the time of the attack, admits that she remembers little of that fateful day.
"As it was explained to me, I covered my face with my hands in order to protect myself," said Tejada, who also suffered the fracturing of eight of her fingers.
As she called 911, Tejada could no longer open her eyes or move. Despite struggling to breathe and stay awake, she made the effort to talk to the operator, giving them Cruz's description and the car he fled in.
"I still wonder, how I could have picked up the phone if all of my fingers were broken," Tejada recalls.
"How could I talk if my jaw was broken?" She never imagined her boyfriend, who she had been with since she was 13, could betray her in such a brutal way, especially since, according to her, he had never been violent.
"I thought he was the love of my life," Tejada said.
Though police had speculated that Cruz had fled to Mexico, even offering a $15,000 reward for information leading to his arrest, he was found dead months after the attack after crashing his car in Angeles National Forest. Authorities could not determine if the death was an accident or a suicide.
It is believed that Cruz attacked the young woman because she no longer wanted to get married and was planning on moving out of their home. The pair had fought the night before the incident, Tejada said.
She sent a text message to her cousins: "If something happens to me, it was Brian. I told them that if anything happened to me, I wanted them to know it was him," she said.
Tejada recalls the long and difficult four years she faced after the attack, with doctors having to reconstruct her face.
"It was like a jigsaw puzzle, putting all the pieces where they go, most of my face is 90% metal." Although she insists that physically she is not the same, she understands that not just anyone survives such an inhumane incident.
