(February 3, 1991 - 1994) (divorced)
His second wife, Julie, shot him during a domestic dispute in 1994. The bullet went through both lungs and both lower chambers of his heart. Trace believes he survived because his home was so close to a trauma rated hospital. He never pressed charges against his now ex-wife.
Much of Adkins' music is drawn from his own experiences. His greatest flirtation with death, occurred February 1st 1994 when Adkins and his second wife of three years, Julie Curtis, got into an argument over his beer drinking. Curtis grabbed the family's .38 pistol.
"Being a macho guy like I am, I tried to scare it out of her hand," he recalled to Samantha Miller of People. I said, 'Give me the gun, or I'm gonna take it away from you...." Despite the threat, Curtis reacted by firing the gun.
"The bullet passed through both my lungs and both ventricles of my heart. What my hunting buddies would call a 'kill shot." He staggered into his tiled Florida room for fear of bleeding on the carpet. "I thought, 'if I bleed on this new Berber carpet, she might shoot me again,"' he writes in his book.
Adkins' torso is covered in scars from the event. After recovering from several surgeries to repair his heart and lungs and divorcing Curtis (Adkins declined pressing charges and the police ruled the shooting accidental), his luck, in terms of his musical career began to change.