QUITMAN COUNTY, Miss. — A Mississippi woman says she had no choice but to shoot the man she says had been physically abusing her, and was breaking into her home.

The woman, still traumatized, says she fired one shot from a deer rifle to end what she calls hours of abuse.

“I thought I was going to die,” Sherron Daniels said. “He beat me for 10 hours. Beat and tortured me for 10 hours.”

Daniels said she’d suffered far too long when she shot Billy Earl Macknally on Thursday morning, after he smashed through the front door of her home in Crowder, Mississippi.

She said she and Macknally had been dating since May.

“He was nice up until Monday night, and something just snapped in him, and he was just going crazy,” she said.

Daniels says Macknally hit her with a whiskey bottle and started beating her.

“My head was bleeding real bad but I didn’t have any broken bones or anything like that.”

She said he took her truck and left, and she went to the hospital in Batesville on Tuesday. When she was discharged Wednesday, she went straight to Justice Court in Marks to get a warrant, fearing something worse was going to happen.

“I had my friend come spend the night with me Wednesday night ‘cause I was scared. Scared he was gonna come back,” she said. “He did come back.”

Before Quitman County deputies could locate Macknally, he showed up on Daniels’ front porch. Daniels said she was ready with a high-powered rifle.

“Me and my friend was so scared,” she said. “I grabbed my gun, she ran to the bedroom. He busted out the front glass window and got in the house and was coming the bedroom where we were at. And I shot him.”

Daniels said she hasn’t been charged with anything and was told the shooting was “justified.”

The Quitman County coroner confirmed the man killed was Macknally. WREG reached out to the sheriff’s department for more details in the case.