'You Just Won't Die': Woman Was Stabbed 38 Times But Fought To Live In Ocean County Lot

TOMS RIVER, NJ — Eva Phillips took a deep breath and began reading the statement she had worked on for weeks, sharing what happened to her on Jan. 5, 2023 in a parking lot in Brick Township.

“I had no idea what he was planning,” Eva said Friday afternoon, telling Ocean County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Palmer and those in Palmer's courtroom attendance what she went through then and in the more than two years since Harry Bray Jr. tried to take her life, three weeks after she broke off their relationship.

Bray pleaded guilty Nov. 12 to first-degree attempted murder for stabbing Eva 38 times in her body and face and trying to slit her throat during a 45-minute attack in the lot near the secluded Cherry Quay bicycle and walking trail.

“He drove away like I was trash,” Eva said. “I am here to speak his evil.”

Palmer sentenced Bray on Friday to 18 years in prison, the maximum sentence for the charge. It is subject to the No Early Release Act, meaning Bray must serve a minimum of 15.3 years before he is eligible for parole. He also will be subject to 5 years of parole supervision after he is released from prison.

“This was cold, this was calculated, and a punishment for ending a relationship,” Palmer said, rejecting a request for mercy from Bray, who told Palmer the attack was a one-time out-of-character action sparked by an argument.

Bray apologized mostly to his family and friends for his “bad decision,” and for not not ending the relationship sooner. He never looked at Eva or her mother, and never used Eva’s name as he read his statement, at one point asking why Eva didn’t end the relationship sooner if it was so bad. He finished with a simple “you didn’t deserve any of this.”

Eva and her mother, Deborah Phillips, simply shook their heads as he spoke.

Eva continues to recover from the attack that happened after she broke off her relationship with Bray after just shy of a year. The large kitchen knife hit every major organ in her torso except her heart and left her with significant damage to her abdomen that leads to trips to the emergency room on a regular basis. He stabbed her in the genitals and in her anus. She has permanent drop foot in her right foot from nerve damage, making it impossible to fully flex her ankle. She’s saving up for surgery on her left hand to repair damaged tendons that result in three fingers locking in a closed position.

There’s the emotional trauma, too, not only for her, but for her young daughter, her mother and her siblings and friends, with ongoing therapy.

Eva is not letting any of it hold her back, however.

“I want him to know he did not break me,” Eva said Monday afternoon in an interview ahead of the sentencing. She is studying social work at Rutgers University and anticipates earning her bachelor’s degree in May 2026. She has a 4.0 through her first semester of classes and plans to get a master’s and a doctorate, so she can open a practice and help other survivors of domestic violence.

“I want him to know I am living my life to the fullest,” she said.

Bray, 37, will receive credit for the two years he’s been in jail and could be eligible for parole in 2038.

“I will be at every parole hearing,” she said.

"You just won’t die, huh"

Eva Phillips remembers lying on the ground in the parking lot at the Cherry Quay trail head in Brick. It was sometime after 5 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2023.

She was bleeding profusely from multiple stab wounds and Bray was standing nearby, casually vaping and scrolling through her phone.

“I remember pleading with him, saying, “Please, I’m dying,” Eva said. “He said, ‘Good.’ At that point I knew his goal was he wanted me to die.”

She speaks calmly, whatever fear or anger tucked away. She had agreed to meet Bray one last time for closure on the relationship she had ended in mid-December 2022. She had not expected him to attack her, or for the attack to go on endlessly.

“He would vape, he'd come back over and he'd stab me again,” Eva said. She was on her belly at this point, lying near the rear tires of her car, which she had backed into the parking space to make it easy if she needed a quick escape.

That was before Bray had started to stab her, intent on taking her life.

He came back to Eva as she laid there on the ground, grabbed her by the hair and lifted her head. The motions she makes with her hands as she describes the moment he tried to slit her throat are chilling.

He tried to put the knife to her neck by her right ear, but Eva reached up to grab it and try to protect her throat. At first she reached up with her right hand but realized that was a problem.

“I’m a righty. I said, I’ll never be able to write again,” so she reached up with her left, fighting to keep the blade off her neck. Bray cut every tendon in her left hand as he sliced four times.

“They told me it was mangled,” Eva said authorities told her weeks later, after she came out of the coma.

Bray knelt over her and whispiered, “You just won’t die, huh.” Eva said she knew there was only one hope.

“I have to play dead,” she said. “I know I’m dying but I have to act like I’m already dead.”

Bray lifted her head up again. “I rolled my eyes back and he dropped my head,” she said.

Bray yanked off her jewelry – a silver necklace with a heart pendant and a ring she had bought for herself — “you know, one of those rings where you melt the candle to get it,” she said with a laugh, "not an engagement ring like they said" — and she could hear the clink of them hitting the metal as he threw them into the trash can.

Bray finally left the parking lot a short time later.

Warning signs

Eva Phillips said she had ended her relationship with Bray after several alarming incidents where he had hurt her or lied to her.

They had been dating for six months when she learned he had lied about his employment. Bray told her he worked as a nursing supervisor in an emergency room and went so far as to have a uniform complete with a nametag that Eva saw when she would visit Bray’s home in Manchester.

She discovered the truth by accident one afternoon when she borrowed Bray’s truck to move some large items. Her purse spilled, and as she picked up the contents she came across a paystub with Bray’s name for a swimming pool company, dated during the time they had been dating. When she confronted him, Bray gave her the silent treatment for nearly two weeks.

“I know now that is part of domestic violence,” Eva said. She is studying social work at Rutgers University now with a focus on helping others who are victims of domestic violence. It is a significant problem in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control, with 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men experiencing it during their lifetimes.

In the book “Domestic Violence,” authors and researchers Martin R. Huecker, Kevin C. King, Gary A. Jordan and William Smock share data showing that women 18 and older experience at least 5 million acts of domestic violence annually, and men are subjected to more than 3 million acts of domestic violence each year.

While most of them involve less severe acts such as “grabbing, shoving, pushing, slapping, and hitting, serious and sometimes fatal injuries do occur,” the authors wrote.

In addition, 1 in 6 women and 1 in 19 men have experienced stalking during their lifetimes, the majority by someone they know, the authors wrote.

Eva said that was her experience: the lying, then physical incidents — biting her lip during a public “kiss” after a disagreement; taking her keys away from her and blocking the doorway to keep her from leaving; taking her cell phone away from her, and choking her.

Those moments were never the result of loud angry fights, she said. “They were disagreements,” Eva said. But after a disagreement, Bray would suddenly snap, she said.

“One of the times he put me onto the bed and just started choking me until I saw lights,” Eva said.

Because Eva was a single mother — she shares custody of her daughter with the girl’s father — it limited the time she and Bray could spend together because her daughter is her priority, Eva said.

“I think that’s why it took me so long to end (the relationship),” she said.

The most dangerous time

Domestic violence experts say the most dangerous time for a victim is when they finally end the relationship. Reaching the point of leaving is rarely a straight line. Fear — of the other person's reaction and of the future, especially financial considerations — and the effects of manipulation can make it hard to break away.

For Eva, the concern for her safety was enough, and in mid-December she told Bray it was over. That only fueled his attention, she said. While she blocked him on her phone, he began texting and calling her mother. He also began stalking Eva, accosting her in stores and showing up at her mother’s home and at Eva’s workplace.

“He would park by the dumpster and he'd wait for me,” she said. One of her co-workers saw him and waited for an hour after work, sitting in the parking lot to make sure Eva was safe because Bray was there, Eva said.

He went so far as to drop off gifts at her mother’s house on Christmas. Eva did not open them.
She moved into a domestic violence shelter for safety.

One day in early January 2023, Bray messaged her through social media.

“I had forgotten to block him there,” Eva said. He asked her to meet him, so he could get closure.

“I'm so sorry, I just want closure, I just want to talk,” she said Bray told her. “Me being the nice person I am — I have a big heart to a fault — I was like, OK, we're not going to get back together, we're going to talk, we'll have closure. Fine.”

On Jan. 5, she dropped her daughter, then 2 years old, at daycare and went to work.

“I gave her a kiss and said I would see her later,” Eva said. Little did she know that “later” would be seven months, after multiple surgeries, infections, pneumonia, a stroke and dying twice, and stays in a rehabilitation facility.

All day she had second thoughts about meeting Bray but pushed them aside, thinking that if he had closure, he would finally leave her alone.

Eva had agreed to meet him at the parking lot in Cherry Quay because they had met there up in the past and gone for walks on the trails. Bray texted her repeatedly that day, confirming that she was going to meet him.

When she arrived, Bray had backed into a parking space, so she did as well. When she got out of her car, he suggested they go for a walk on the trails. She refused, saying she had been on her feet all day and it was too cold.

Eva paused here as she recounted the events, the unspoken clarity now of what might have happened to her apparent on her face.

Bray told her he forgot something in his car and started to go back to it, then said, “No, I have it,” Eva said. As he turned to come back to where she was standing, she saw the knife.

“It was like a Michael Myers knife,” the blade of the large kitchen knife stuck through his waistband. When she expressed surprise, Bray told her he’d started a new job and the knife was for work.

He started stabbing her moments later.

"Don't let me die"

"It's so weird how your body remembers specific things," Eva said. "I remember the silence in the cold air, and the trees. I remember him trying to get me to the ground and me going 'Stop, stop.' I remember just our breaths as were were fighting, trying to get him off me."

The memories are spotty, like a movie flashing rapidly between moments. She remembers finally being on the ground, but not actually falling. She remembers him kicking her.

She remembers seeing a house in the distance and thinking if she could only get there, she could get help.

Eva had put her phone in the left side of her bra so she could reach it in an emergency, but when Bray knocked her to the ground, it went flying just out of reach, she said. She tried to grab it to call 911 but Bray got to it first, then began demanding her passcode.

"I love true crime shows," she said, and she credits hours spent watching them with giving her the presence of mind to think about how to escape.

That's what led her to the decision to pretend she was dead, in the hope Bray would leave.

It worked, though not instantly. After Bray lifted her head and Eva rolled her eyes back, he went through her car.

"I could hear all the doors opening and him shuffling things," Eva said. He came back around to her, and covered her with a blanket. Not any blanket — her daughter's favorite blanket. Palmer, at sentencing, said that appeared to be a deliberate act to taunt Eva.

Bray slashed the tires on her car — "I heard the pop" — and tossed her necklace and ring in the trash. She saw him drive away.

After a few minutes Eva tried to sit up, but the injuries to her abdomen were so severe that she laid back down on her stomach.

"My dad was a Vietnam veteran; he passed due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma from Agent Orange," she said. In that moment at the park, she could hear him telling her to get back on her stomach and put pressure on the wounds.

Eva said she realized crawling into the car or to the house in the distance was not possible.

"I prepared to die. I said my goodbyes," she said. She said goodbye to her mother, her siblings, her friends. The most difficult was her daughter.

"I was just telling God please take care of her," Eva said as tears spilled down her cheeks.

As she laid there bleeding, she heard a vehicle pull into the parking lot. At first she thought Bray had come back, but she saw the police lights of the vehicle of Brick Township Patrol Officer Michael Miller.

When he saw her car with the doors open and the tires slashed he approached cautiously, she said. Then he saw Eva.

"He called out to me and said 'oh my God are you OK, ma'am, are you okay,' and I said ‘no, I'm dying," she said. "When he showed up I felt safe. There was finally somebody else there besides me and Harry and I felt safe."

"I said, 'I have a daughter, please don't let me die,' " Eva said.

She also had seen enough of the crime shows where the suspect was not known that she was determined to make sure police knew who was responsible.

"I was like I need to say his name before I can't talk anymore," Eva said. "I said his name, his address," and she told Miller her daughter was at daycare and needed to be picked up.

"He told me 'I'm not going to let you die,' and I believed him," she said.

Miller had called for emergency medical services and EMTs arrived shortly thereafter.

In court, Senior Assistant Prosecutor Ashley Angelo said the wounds were so severe that for a moment the EMTs didn’t know where to begin. They packed Eva’s wounds with combat bandages then put her into the ambulance.

“If the ambulance had arrived one minute later, I would have died,” Eva said. The doors closing were the last waking memory Eva had for weeks.

Survival and moving forward

Eva did in fact die — twice. She coded as soon as the ambulance doors closed, and was revived. At Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, where she underwent 18½ hours of surgery, she coded on the table.

“They didn’t give up on me,” Eva said. “And I am so grateful for that.”

They worked to stitch up wounds that included damage to her liver, pancreas, intestine, stomach, and bladder. Her lungs collapsed, punctured by the knife and by broken ribs she suffered when Bray kicked her on the ground. She needed three full blood transfusions.

She had suffered damage to her genitals and her anus from stab wounds inflicted by Bray – who, during one of the stretches where he scrolled through her phone, went into her Facebook account and sent a message to a man in her friends list, asking the man to have sex — actions Palmer cited as particularly depraved.

Eva was in a coma for six weeks and suffered a stroke, and doctors were not sure if she would ever speak or walk again. She spent time on a ventilator, suffered multiple infections and three bouts of pneumonia. After five months in the hospital and two months to rehabilitation facilities to learn how to walk and talk again, she was finally able to go home.

Deborah Phillips, who also spoke in court, said it was agonizing seeing her daughter fighting for her life, and listening to her screams of pain every day as they changed her bandages.

“I was in the medical field for 13 years. I worked in the emergency room,” she said in an interview. “It’s completely different when it’s your child.”

Eva has intermittent memories of those days — noises, room layouts and more. Some of the experiences have deepened her faith in God, including the sense of her father watching over her, she said.

That includes two experiences that may have been when she died and was brought back to life. In one, she was married to “a tall, dark handsome man,” and they had three children including her daughter. In the other, there were clouds with hole in the center, and a woman and a man talking to her, saying, “Are you ready Eva?” “It was just so beautiful,” Eva said. “It was like cloudy but had lights too. I guess I was very hesitant,” she said.

A pastor later told her that she was sent back because she wasn’t ready to die just yet.

Eva said even the day she finally awakened from the coma and started speaking seemed significant: It was the same date of the year as when her father had died in 2018.

The recovery continues to be challenging. Eva has a fistula that has not healed and causes problems on a daily basis. While walking has improved, it takes conscious effort because she cannot lift her foot normally, otherwise she will trip. She has a cane she keeps handy for long days when she’s on her feet.

Her hair, which had been well down her back before the attack, had to be cut off because it was so badly matted with her blood, Eva said. It has taken more than a year for it to grow back to shoulder length.

The financial challenges are significant. Eva frequently winds up in the hospital because of the problems with the fistula. While she has received assistance from New Jersey’s Victims of Crime Compensation Office, it does not cover the extent of the medical care she needs — including the therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression resulting from the attack. In court, Angelo said the VCCO had paid about $8,300 of Eva's expenses. A GoFundMe campaign started in April 2024 by one of Eva's best friends has provided much-needed relief, including money to replace her car, which authorities held as evidence in the case.

There’s also the impact on her family. Deborah, who spoke at the sentencing hearing, said the medical bills are tremendous. There are 14 20-pound boxes of medical records just as a result of the attack.

There’s also the emotional pain for Deborah of watching her daughter suffering all the months in the hospital and worrying about her as she recovers.

Eva said the hardest thing for her has been the effects of this on her daughter, who she was not able to see in person for seven months. She did see her daughter on Facetime, but the little girl simply stared at her mother, who was still seriously injured.

Eva said the girl’s father told her that for months the little girl would put on her shoes and coat and go to the door to wait for her mother to pick her up, saying “bye bye, Mommy go home.” She has attachment issues and separation anxiety now, Eva said.

Helping others

“It’s finally over,” Eva said in the hallway outside the courtroom on Friday, expressing relief that Bray had received the maximum possible sentence. Palmer also ordered that he have no contact with Eva or her family, and a restraining order is in place.

Now Eva can focus on the future, which for her means putting her energy into her daughter and into efforts to help other victims of domestic violence.

“There’s not enough counseling available,” she said, especially for survivors of domestic violence. She wants to help others navigate the trauma that goes with spending time at the hands of an abuser to help others move on successfully and help them escape abusers.

She also wants to make sure that victims, especially women, understand that they do not owe someone a piece of their time and they are not required to be nice about it.

“I feel like in society that's how we're raised as women,” Eva said. “You know, you have to be dainty, you have to be kind, but you don't always have to be. Your health and your well-being come first.”

“Now I know to recognize the signs," Eva said. “My goal is to spread awareness to others so that they don't you know feel the need to give in or be nice.”

Eva admits feeling extremely lucky to be alive and even to having survivor’s guilt that she survived against extremely long odds. She follows other domestic violence cases and keeps track of the names of those who have died. That's why she would like to do more to help remember those who have died at the hands of their abusers.

“That's the abuser's goal, for them to be gone and not remembered,” she said.

She knows that better than most, because it almost happened to her.

If you or someone you know is the victim of domestic violence and needs help, call 800-799-SAFE (7233) or visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline for more information and resources. Call 911 if you are in immediate danger.

Previous coverage:

• Stabbing In Cherry Quay Under Investigation: Brick Police
• Man Charged With Attempted Murder In Cherry Quay Stabbing In Brick
• Woman Stabbed In Brick Was Ending Relationship, Mom Says: Affidavit
• Man Ordered Held Until Trial In Brick Stabbing
• Woman Found Stabbed In Brick Parking Lot Still Fights To Recover
• Manchester Man Admits Stabbing Ex-Girlfriend In Parking Lot