HAMILTON — A Caledonia, Ont., woman told court Friday that abandoning her home was never an option because she feared it would be destroyed by native protesters occupying the land surrounding her property.

"I'm not moving out of my house (until) I get my money from my house," said Dana Chatwell, who is suing Ontario Provincial Police and the Ontario government for failing to protect her, her family and property during the native occupation of a planned housing development nearby.

"No way I'm moving out of my house and having it torched or ransacked," she said, her voice rising in anger, in response to a question from government lawyer David Feliciant.

Feliciant repeatedly made the point that Chatwell had left the family home for work and on various vacations. Chatwell had said earlier that she had lived in a state of fear, and continues to live in fear for safety to this day.

But the 46-year-old hairdresser said there should be no reason to abandon her own home.

"I grew up there," she added.

It was the first day of cross-examination of Chatwell, who on Thursday gave emotional testimony under examination by her own lawyer about the fear and stresses that she and her family had been living under for the past three years. And at one point, she knocked legal binders to the floor in anger.

Less demonstrative on Friday, Chatwell told the court her home has become an awful place to live, that the rooms need painting and the roof needs to be repaired.

"But why should I bother, with all this crap going on."

Chatwell, 45, her husband, David Brown, 42, and her son Dax, 18, are suing the Ontario government and Ontario Provincial Police for $7 million for failing to protect them when their home was caught behind native barricades in 2006.

The occupation began in February 2006 over a land-claim dispute by the Six Nations Reserve. In April, a skirmish broke out between police and natives. The police were pushed off the land by natives who then erected barricades, isolating the Brown-Chatwell home.

The stress of living in a virtual state of siege led to extraordinary marital, financial and emotional stresses, court heard earlier.

But Feliciant tried to tear that notion down. He noted that Chatwell was diagnosed by her family doctor with situational stress disorder a year before the protests began. He also noted that she and her husband had received more than $40,000 in inheritance money and other payouts in the fall of 2006, including money from a provincial government plan to help affected businesses in the area. He then went on to catalogue patterns of alcohol abuse and spending on vacations to resort islands in the Gulf of Mexico and California.

Chatwell said the vacations were necessary for her to deal with the stress and she mentioned that a trip to Cuba was actually paid for by a friend.

To that, Feliciant said, "You have generous friends."

She replied, "I do."

He also mentioned government counselling that was provided to residents of Caledonia and asked whether she had taken advantage of that.

"I wasn't going to government counselling because I didn't trust them. The people I knew who went said the counsellors were crying more than the (patients)."

Friday's court session was the last until Jan. 4. Judge Thomas Bielby said he expects the next part of the trial to last at least a month.

Caledonia is approximately 100 kilometres southwest of Toronto.