Lethality and Domestic Violence: 7 incidents of murder-suicide in 5 weeks
Posted by Kelsey P. on December 3, 2009
There have been seven incidents of domestic violence murder-suicides in our area in the past 5 weeks.
November 4th: Tameka Medina and her 4 year old son Ashawn were killed by killed by her longtime boyfriend and recent ex, who she had recently fled from. He then killed himself.
November 10th: Teresa Beiser was shot and killed by her recently separated husband in the Tualatin drug testing lab where she worked. Robert Beiser then killed himself.
November 11th: Varsha Suthar and her 9 year old son Ronak were murdered in their Bethany home by their husband and father, Mukesh Suthar, who then killed himself.
November 17th: Ashley Kendall of Myrtle Point was shot by her husband after meeting with an attorney in Coos Bay. Her husband fatally shot himself after he shot her.
November 27th: Cindy England and her adult son Kevin Coleman were killed by her husband, Steve England, who then killed himself in their Forest Grove home.
November 29th: Sheena Mendoza was shot and killed by her ex-boyfriend, Curt Wayne Wise, in the Hillsboro hair salon where she worked. Wise shot himself and died two days later.
December 2nd: An unnamed woman was killed by her husband in their Vancouver, WA home. The couple’s 5 year old child found them dead.
As a survivor of interpersonal violence and staff at PWCL, I take this spike in domestic violence homicides very seriously. Doing this work comes with knowing that we will be faced with loss. Doing this work means we come to learn that when the economy isn’t doing well and unemployment rates rise, that abusers are more likely to abuse and that abuse is more likely to be lethal. Knowing this, still, nothing that I’ve been taught through training or my own experience surviving violence could have prepared me to know that so many people have been taken from our community in the past month due to domestic violence.
I’ve heard my coworkers and friends ask, “what’s happening?!” And yet this morning, as I log onto a local news site, I see that the local Ducks vs. Beavers civil war game is getting more attention than the woman killed just yesterday in a domestic violence murder-suicide in Vancouver. And I have to ask, who are we, really? What do we value?
This lack of appropriate dialogue is nothing new yet it remains completely unacceptable. Please keep these people and their loved ones in your thoughts and take every opportunity you have available to speak out against domestic and sexual violence.
When your coworker or friends says, “hey, did you see that civil war thing on the news?” respond with, “yeah, but did you see that there have been 7 murders due to domestic violence in our community in the past month?”
When you see a domestic violence murder on the bottom of the news sites, write your local news stations and demand more in-depth coverage. Ask them to refer to PWCL in their stories so that others can reach out for help.
Donate to agencies like PWCL that are trying to provide crucial safety planning services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence with very limited resources. As I write this now, the Crisis Line continues to ring as we respond to the more than 26,000 calls that come in from survivors and their loved ones in our area, and we’re having trouble getting to all of those calls. Please think about helping out anyway you can.
All we can do is keep working to end domestic and sexual violence. I focus on that as I step into the office, and it carries with me when I’m not here, too. This is an epidemic that our community has wished to ignore for a long time. How many more lives will be lost before we band together to do something about it?