We failed Nikki James. And her kids. And all the other victims of domestic violence.
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Domestic violence murders in Lexington are rising. Why?
The number of domestic violence related homicides have skyrocketed in the first six months of 2022, according to Lexington Police Department statistics. There have been eight people killed by a family member, someone close to them or a partner as of June 1. That’s almost as many in six months as the nine domestic violence related homicides recorded in the previous four years.
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We failed Nikki James. And her kids. And all the other victims of domestic violence.
We failed Nikki James and her children.
Of that there can be no doubt. A single mother of two young children, reportedly facing eviction notices, somehow fell into a mental health crisis so severe that she killed her two children with a knife. Police and teacher visits reportedly found nothing wrong, but enough red flags were raised along the way, according to Beth Musgrave’s reporting, that somehow she and her children should have been saved.
We also failed Lisa Wilson, and her daughters, Bryonny Wilson and Bronwyn Wilson. They were shot and killed by their husband and father, Steve Wilson. (We have so normalized domestic violence by men that Steve Wilson’s mental health has been much less discussed.)
We failed Landon Hayes, just 10 years old. We failed Darian Webb, 18, and Leslie Bales, 54, allegedly stabbed to death by her son.
The pandemic has no doubt created so many “lives of quiet desperation,” to quote Thoreau, that anxiety, stress and mental illness can explode in an instant into death. We know that domestic violence is about control and anger, but we never know enough about all the places something went wrong, what we may have missed.
It’s about too few mental health services and too many guns. It’s about our society, forged in individualism, in which we respect people’s privacy to a fault. It’s about economics, where too many have to try to support their families on too little.
It’s about a system of laws on domestic violence that still have too many gaps. As advocates told reporter Beth Musgrave, a judge has the power to make a domestic violence abuser turn over their guns, the weapons used in two-thirds of domestic violence homicides. But who gets to go get the guns, who makes sure it actually happens? In Kentucky, it’s a spotty system that depends on which county you live in.
Domestic violence is a huge factor in mass shootings, too. In more than half of mass shootings — where four or more people are killed — the shooter killed an intimate partner or family member, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.
Red flag laws and more intensive background checks from licensed dealers are two common-sense ways we could stop some of these killings. The Charleston loophole is another easy fix — currently, if the FBI takes more than three days to return a background check, the sale can go through anyway. That’s how the killer at Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston was able to acquire his guns.
Domestic violence is cyclical and generational, but still don’t know all the best ways to stop it. We will know more in coming years, thanks to a new law that for the first time will require the state to collect all domestic violence statistics. But the first report from all the state agencies won’t be required until July 2023.
Here in Lexington, we are lucky to have shelters such as GreenHouse17, which has sheltered so many domestic violence survivors and opened up better lives to them, and across Kentucky, there are dedicated advocates who work tirelessly to make domestic violence less of a societal scourge. Maybe these tragedies can ensure they get the help they need, and we don’t turn away when the next news cycle comes on.
This story was originally published June 9, 2022 at 11:00 AM.
