Wednesday, April 7, 2010

New Orleans, LA: Treme triple murder suspect's domestic violence case being reviewed

By Gwen Filosa, The Times-Picayune
April 06, 2010, 5:42PM
Rusty Costanza / The Times-Picayune
The Treme house where three women were killed on March 31 has been boarded up.
As 78-year-old Alfred Andrews remains in the hospital recovering from the bullet he put into his face after police said he gunned down his wife, her sister, and her mother in his Treme house March 31, the criminal justice system is reviewing the gruesome case through
the.transcript of a domestic violence misdemeanor case that Andrews emerged from victorious just two days before the home fell into horror.
Two days before Jennifer Muse, 31, Wanda Wagner Simpson, 50, and Monica Muse, 25, were shot to death before 3 a.m. in the 800 block of North Robertson Street, Andrews admitted that on July 29, 2009, he blocked his wife from leaving their bedroom and pushed her down, according to a transcript of the trial.
Jennifer Muse simply wanted to sleep on the sofa, but Andrews said he objected.
"I'm guilty of pushing her," Andrews testified March 29 before the magistrate commissioner at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, seated in a wheelchair although he wasn't confined to one when he clashed with his wife, whom he had been with since she was younger than the legal age of consent. "I'm guilty, your honor, of pushing her but I'm not guilty of hitting her."
John McCusker / The Times-Picayune
Police surround the home on North Robertson Street where three women were killed on March 31.
Jennifer Muse testified that she punched Andrews in the face three times "because I was shoved down on the floor and bleeding and he wouldn't let me out the room."
A tangled relationship
Muse and Andrews had been married only a few months, but had a lengthy history that neighbors said began when a young Jennifer Muse lived with Andrews, who had dated her mother in the past.
The court saw the photographs of her injuries, and heard from the police officer who took Andrews' incriminating statement at the scene, before hearing both versions from Muse and Andrews before delivering an acquittal.
Magistrate Commissioner Marie Bookman, who heard the trial, said that "this altercation could have been prevented," but that Muse had her own role in the argument that left her with a bloody nose.
"I believe that when it came to pushing, that he was defending himself in pushing someone off," Bookman said on the bench March 29. "Ms. Muse was probably right for not wanting to be awakened, she was weary and tired, but that's a part of the consequence. She married someone 50 years, 40 years older. And, so that's one of the consequences.
"I'm not blaming her because I also know, when I look at the full picture, she was very young when she got with the defendant and she was probably very much under his control, and full control, meaning from financial support to being guided, you know, totally directed by this man. He is now elderly."
Gunman suspected infidelity, police say
Andrews shot down the women in his life after accusing his wife of infidelity, police said.
The first body found was Simpson, lying below the porch steps, shot in the chest. As officers approached her, gunshots blasted inside the lime-green two-story shotgun home.
Jennifer and Monica Muse died from gunshots to the face, the same wound suffered by Andrews, who police say will be booked with three counts of murder if he survives at University Hospital.
The only person to escape injuries during the rampage was the couple's 14-year-old son, who police described as mentally challenged and who is in a relative's care.
A history of violent behavior
The 31-page transcript of the Andrews domestic abuse battery trial is painfully clear that the Treme home was steeped in violent behavior long before July 29, from the refusal to let a spouse sleep to the shoving that led to a 911 call by Jennifer Muse.
"Domestic violence is about torture, a continuum of violence," said Tania Tetlow, director of the domestic violence clinic at Tulane University. "Some of it is sexual humiliation and abuse. It's the combination over time that really matters."
Bookman recognized red flags, said Tetlow, which included the fact that the couple had been together since Muse was a child and Andrews' claim that they had never fought before, but the commissioner doesn't add them up as symptoms of a classic domestic violence case.
"Instead of seeing that as an indication that it's an abusive household, she sees it as provocation that to her indicates Muse was the instigator," said Tetlow. "Rather than further evidence that this is somebody who is abusive."
A sympathetic figure in court
Andrews testified that he never hit Muse.
"And I was sorry that I pushed her because I never had to hit her," he said on March 29. "Never."
No one ever asks exactly what Andrews wanted to discuss with his wife after 2 a.m. that day, or brings up the fact that Andrews had been booked in 1996 with forcible rape but never charged.
"We been together so long and we never had a disagreement," said Andrews, who cut a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the court, where he appeared in a motorized wheelchair to testify that he indeed pushed his 31-year-old wife but only after she began hitting him during a pre-dawn argument.
Muse wanted to leave the bedroom and sleep on the sofa, but Andrews said, "I wanted to get this over with."
Muse had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to get to her nursing assistant's job at 6 a.m.
"I wanted to clear it up; I wanted to get it off my chest," Andrews testified. "And she start take it upon me, the pillow, and went going to the other room. And I said, I object to that."
Muse picked up a stool, Andrews said, and said she would throw it out the window in order to leave the room.
"I didn't want her to break the window," Andrews said. "We had just fixed the window."
Andrews said he grabbed a piece of the stool and pushed.
"And when I pushed her, I fell on her and she fell on the book edge, cut her nose. I was sorry for that."
Andrews said that Muse punched him repeatedly in his face and stomach, but that he didn't see a doctor.
"I lived through them," Andrews said. "I did what I usually do when I feel bad or when I'm bleeding inside. Take antibiotics."
'This is where the story turns'
Bookman, in her reasons for ruling which take up three pages of the transcript, said that Andrews tried to stop Muse from leaving the bedroom.
"This is where the story turns," Bookman said. "The defendant states and admits that he did wake her up because he wanted to complete a discussion, have a conversation, and get to the bottom of something so that they can leave it alone. These people have been together for 15 years. And I get the impression from the testimony of the defendant, and given his age, that he has a certain way he does things and that he is set in his ways."
Bookman said, "I believe that, but for her nose sustaining a scratch on it and bleeding, that she would not have called the police."
Before acquitting Andrews, Bookman said that she believes Muse "is frustrated more than she is anything else."
"I'm not here to judge why she is frustrated or mean or how she treats the defendant," Bookman said. "Because I don't live in the house with him, she does. She lives in the house with him."
On Dec. 21, Bookman politely greeted Andrews at a pretrial hearing in court to determine counsel for Andrews.
"Who is that gentleman, the good-looking gentleman with the Old Navy shirt?" Bookman asked a public defender.
"Alfred Andrews," attorney Sierra Van Borst replied.

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