By STEVEN ELBOW | The Capital Times | selbow@madison.com | Posted: Saturday, December 26, 2009 5:30 am
Attacks by two men that left four dead and three injured capped an ugly year for domestic violence victims, who advocates say have been subjected to higher levels of brutality during a recession-plagued 2009.
On Dec. 3, police say Tyrone Adair, 38 and out of work, killed his girlfriend, Tracy Judd, and their 23-month-old daughter. Then, police say, Adair shot former girlfriend Amber Weigel and their 2-year-old daughter to death before turning a gun on himself.
The killings followed the shootings on Nov. 28 of Zenolia Rice, her 8-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son, who all survived despite the fact Rice was shot multiple times and the children were each shot in the head. Rice’s partner and the father of the two children, 38-year-old Donte Beasley, has been charged with the crimes.
The incidents sent shock waves through the community and stunned police officials and those serving domestic abuse victims.
“It’s alarming to all of us in the system,” says Shannon Barry, executive director of Domestic Abuse Intervention Services, the lead agency for providing services to battered women in Dane County.
The deaths pushed the total domestic-abuse-related murder count to seven in Dane County this year, two more than the five identified last year by the Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Had Rice and her children not survived, that number would have doubled the 2008 total.
In Adair’s case, there were warning signs. Three women, none of them the two he killed, requested domestic abuse retraining orders against Adair between 1995 and 2006. In March of this year, he was arrested after a domestic incident involving Judd, but prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to charge him. And according to Dane County sheriff’s officials, Judd was in the process of leaving Adair, which Barry says put her even more at risk.
“We know that victims are six times more likely to be killed by their abusers when trying to separate from the partner than at any other time,” Barry says. “So that’s pretty consistent with what we’ve seen.”
While the multiple shootings of the last few weeks have grabbed headlines, advocates for battered women say an increase in domestic violence had been simmering throughout the year. Domestic abuse hot lines in the area and nationwide have reported drastic increases in the numbers of women seeking help. Officials attribute the increase, and an increasing level of brutality toward victims, to economic hardship.
“We can’t definitively say it’s an economy issue, but it seems to be related to the economic recession,” Barry says.
The Capital Times reported in March that domestic abuse services were seeing a spike in the number of women seeking help. That trend has only become more pronounced.
Domestic Abuse Intervention Services reported a 124-percent increase in clients in crisis for the first quarter of the year. The agency now says the number of those clients is up 144 percent for the first three quarters.
According to Madison Police Department spokesman Joel DeSpain, the department hasn’t tracked crimes associated with domestic violence, and the federal government doesn’t require law enforcement agencies to separate domestic-abuse-related crimes from categories such as battery or aggravated assault. This year, the department has started to put a tracking system in place, but officials still are compiling the numbers.
“To a large extent it flies underneath the radar,” DeSpain says.
While the economy is apparently a factor, Barry says, the commonly held perception that men are snapping because of economic pressure doesn’t hold. Instead, her clients report that because they can’t find jobs and because family and friends that could normally provide shelter are too strapped to take them in, they are finding themselves trapped in abusive relationships they would otherwise have ended. Consequently, they are not leaving until the level of physical abuse forces them out, often with bruises, scars or fractures.
“We’re hearing from our clients that they’re experiencing more severe violence, like death threats, stalking, strangulation and mutilation,” she says.
Barry says Dane County lags every county in the state in the per-capita number of domestic abuse shelter beds: one bed per every 19,000 residents compared with the state average of one bed per 7,300 residents.
Women seeking shelter have overwhelmed the resources of the agency. The 25-bed shelter receives some money, about $29,000, from the city to put victims up in hotels.
“Because we’ve seen such a huge demand for services, that money was expended by the end of August this year,” Barry says.
Consequently, the wait list for the shelter has exploded. In the first three quarters of this year the shelter placed qualifying clients on a wait list 964 times compared with 56 in 2008, a 1,621-percent increase.
The increase in requests for service comes at a time when Barry’s agency is struggling to keep up. She says funding sources are drying up, and the agency has cut its staff of two-and-a-half case worker positions to two.
“It’s been a challenge,” she says. “Our staff are really rising to the challenge, but of course, we’re dealing with burnout issues and things like that.”
While evidence points to an increase in domestic violence, police officials both locally and nationwide are happily surprised at a general decrease in crime, bucking a trend that typically sees an increase during economic downturns.
At mid-year, the Madison Police Department reported a decrease in all crime categories except theft, which was up about 2 percent over 2008. The drop in crime mirrors a national trend, despite higher unemployment and a spike in home foreclosures.
But police this year also found themselves battling a worldwide supply of cheap, potent heroin and a wave of guns.
Sgt. Gordy Disch of the Dane County Narcotics and Gang Task Force says gun seizures have spiked this year, easily surpassing 100 weapons, while in all of 2008, Dane County officers seized 69.
“It’s been a banner year,” he says. “We’ve seized more firearms this year in search warrants and in our street arrests than we have in several years.”
One positive trend: the approximately 20 gunshot incidents in the first half of the year did not escalate into the wild west show that some feared. After police held a news conference to publicize the shooting incidents and contacted some of those they believed were responsible, the incidents tapered off.
“We worked hard to let them know we were aware of what they were doing,” DeSpain says.
Disch says heroin continues to be a huge concern. While deaths from the drug have declined — there were 14 known heroin deaths in Dane County in 2008 and eight in 2009 as of Dec. 11 — it continues to be responsible for more overdoses than any other drug. Disch says there were 122 reported drug overdoses in 2009, but officials still are compiling information about which drugs were involved. But he says it’s “more heroin than anything else.”
While not as pervasive as heroin, Disch says officials are seeing a marked increase in the abuse of prescription drugs, primarily opiates such as morphine and oxycodone, among young people, often stolen from household members and sold or traded in area schools.
“When they’re possession those drugs while they’re in school, it’s of grave concern,” he says.
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