T he horror was over in a little more than an hour, but really, it was just getting started.
A woman — at this point, we’ll let her name rest in peace — was sitting in her car a few weeks ago when her husband shot and killed her. The woman’s 8-year-old son apparently witnessed it all, and he ran into a business to yell that his mom had been shot.
The man doing the shooting, who would later kill himself, was her husband, yes, but there had apparently been problems early on. A marriage notice in this paper predated by only a couple of weeks an incident in which he pointed a gun at the woman and her grown daughter and threatened them.
That potentially lethal tantrum got him two charges of aggravated assault. He would eventually plead guilty to lesser assault charges and take two 12-month sentences. He would be put on probation for that period, and he was to have no contact with the women.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The plea arrangement was likely easier for the prosecution to make with him because the two women eventually signed affidavits saying they didn’t feel threatened by him any longer and didn’t want to be a part of a prosecution against him.
Still, the prosecuting attorney’s office seemed to know better. Instead of letting the man off the hook altogether when it came to his interaction with the women, all of the paperwork that he had to sign along the way included the stipulation that he have no contact with them.
And yet, there she was, sitting in the parking lot where the man worked, having driven there herself.
Head prosecutor Kyle Hunter said such murky circumstances are, sadly, rather regular occurrences. There’s an incident, through protective order, authorities try to put some space between the warring factions. And weeks or maybe days later, the two have made up and are back to living together if not warring. Or one party, usually the woman, has softened on her anger and fear toward her partner and has backed away from cooperating in the other person’s prosecution.
Sometimes those statements guide the prosecution’s office to change the protective order and sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of the woman, the no-contact order stayed in place.
But as Hunter said, who’s to know if it’s followed. If there’s no complaint to police or the person’s parole officer doesn’t get wind of what’s going on, well, the situation just goes on. In the end, the protective order may only be as good as the aggrieved party wants it to be.
And now a mother is dead, and there is an 8-year-old who, unfortunately, is plenty old enough never to forget what happened that morning and who will at least suffer forever more from not having his mother if not from how she perished. That’s the horror that will continue.
There are no answers here, easy or otherwise. Relationships themselves are complicated at times. Most couples work through them. But when the relationships are exacerbated by such things as substance abuse, anger and other mental health issues, the outcomes can be devastating.
For now, the youngster involved in this devastation is with his biological father. As Hunter said, perhaps that will allow him to heal from what happened in that car that morning.