Changing the focus to lower domestic violence rates

On Jan. 30, 2014 Robert Livingston killed his estranged wife, Ingrid, and his mother-in-law, Linda Huber, in Huber's southwest Cedar Rapids home before killing himself.

A month later, Dennis Lee Koopman shot his estranged wife, LuElla, multiple times with an AR-15 rifle outside of her Cedar Rapids apartment before killing himself with the same gun. LuElla had filed for divorce and moved out of the couple's home shortly before.This past September, 20-year-old Iowa State University student Tong Shao's body was found in the trunk of her car in Iowa City. Her boyfriend, Xiangnan Li, 23, awaits trial in China on a charge of 'intentional homicide.”

In February, Mitchell Haferbecker shot and killed his wife, Sherry, and the family dog on the southeast side of Cedar Rapids before killing himself.

In April, Marion was shocked with its first domestic homicide since 2007 when 32-year-old Nicholas Luerkens stabbed and killed his ex-girlfriend, Lynnsey Donald, in the parking lot of a grocery store before trying to kill himself in front of her 7-year-old son. He was charged with first-degree murder immediately upon release from the hospital and is awaiting trial.

These occurrences paint a sad tale of domestic violence. Of the 11 domestic homicides against women that occurred statewide in the past year and a half, five occurred in the Corridor - four in Cedar Rapids and one in Marion - according to data from the Iowa Attorney General's Office.

Three of those murders happened in 2015 alone. (It is uncertain where in Iowa Tong Shao was killed.)

In 2014, all three incidents in the Corridor occurred in Cedar Rapids.

Before 2014, domestic homicides in this part of the state were rare. In 2010 in Cedar Rapids, Christopher Vogt, 42, shot to death Tawny Tomberlin, 43, whom he had dated.

In 2008 in Iowa City, Steven Sueppel, 42, who had been charged with embezzlement from his employer, Hills Bank and Trust, killed his wife and four children, then committed suicide.

While national experts have said spikes in intimate partner violence and homicides tend to correlate with weaker economies and other changes in the sociopolitical climate, no one has a solid answer as to why domestic murders have risen in the Corridor.

'Every single case is different,” said Lindsay Pingel, director of community engagement with the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Des Moines. 'With four victims, kind of coming up with a concrete answer, it's difficult.”

But it is generally agreed that when women have more opportunities to obtain education and more funds are directed toward legal support and law enforcement, fewer cases of domestic violence tend to happen.

'When people are doing well, there's a decrease in these dynamics,” said Janette Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Iowa College of Nursing and intimate partner violence researcher.

Taylor said that for people who kill their partners, it likely wasn't an isolated instance of abuse.

'The literature will tell you that there's usually some warning signs or some patterns that this person has been an abuser,” Taylor said. 'Can someone snap? Well, certainly, they can, however, usually there's some inappropriate behavior, reports to the police, or family members will say that they could see it coming.”

And while she said some factions of society still ask the question, 'Why does she stay with the abuser,” Taylor said the focus should be on 'why do men batter?”

Men make up a large majority of the assailants in domestic violence cases. So far this year, 83 percent of those arrested for domestic abuse in Cedar Rapids were men, according to data from the Cedar Rapids Police Department.

'One of the more dominant theories is around control, power and control, so it's a way that one individual, generally a male …

we do know that it's a way of dominating and preserving control,” Taylor said.

Fewer reports

While domestic murders in the Corridor have been on the rise in the past two years, data from local police departments show that fewer people are filing domestic violence reports. Last year, police collected 522 reports of domestic violence compared to 570 reports filed in 2013.

Fewer people are also being arrested for attacking their partners. So far this year, 68 percent of reports resulted in arrests. In 2014, 72 percent of domestic violence complaints received by the police ended up in an arrest, and in 2013, 82 percent of reports filed resulted in an arrest.

Sgt. Cristy Hamblin, a public relations officer in charge of domestic abuse case training for officers, said assailants often take off after police are called or the County Attorney decided there wasn't enough evidence to issue a warrant for someone's arrest.

'A lot of times, they do (run),” said Hamblin, who's worked with domestic violence cases in Cedar Rapids for about 20 years. 'So we'll look for him that night, but if we can't find him, we can't make the arrest.”

However, she's said that a shift in society's attitude toward intimate partner violence has resulted in a drop in the number of domestic abuse reports over the past 30 years.

'Now we're understanding the pendulum has shifted from ‘it's her responsibility to leave,' putting ownership on the victim, and now we're changing it to ‘why doesn't he just quit hitting her?' To me, it's been great to see society change, and our domestic abuse reports have dropped dramatically,” Hamblin said.

She said in the 1980s and '90s, the department would file about 900 reports of domestic violence a year.

The Marion Police Department reported 77 arrests for domestic-violence-related charges in 2014, down from 59 in 2013.

In Iowa City, 89 arrests were made in 2014, down from 123 in 2014.

Demand for services

While the number of people arrested for domestic violence incidences has dropped in recent years, representatives from area women's shelters said they have consistently seen an uptick in the demand for services.

'We see an increase every year,” said Tara Beck, director of domestic violence programming at Waypoint, a shelter in downtown Cedar Rapids that provides support to individuals who are homeless, living in poverty or are victims of domestic violence in a seven-county radius. 'I don't have any explanation for why we've seen so many in our area recently. It's just kind of the way the chips are falling.”

Last budget year, 2,583 people received domestic violence services at Waypoint, Beck said.

Waypoint has also seen women experiencing more serious attacks recently, she said.

Statewide, the number of domestic homicides with female victims spiked at 16 in 2006 and 15 in 2010. Since 2010, an average of seven women a year are killed by their partners statewide, according to data from the state attorney general's office.

Domestic murders against women made up 34 percent of homicides in Iowa from 2011 to 2013.

Nationwide, 39.3 percent of homicides where the victim was female were domestic murders, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

20 states, but not Iowa

The seriousness of intimate partner violence in Iowa isn't lost on state lawmakers and advocacy groups. A measure proposed in the Iowa Legislature for the past few years would impose harsher penalties upon abusers in dating relationships.

Lindsay Pingel, director of community engagement with the Des Moines-based Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said the advocacy group has championed the change in state law for the past 13 years.

Under current law, offenders in dating relationships are criminally prosecuted for regular assault rather than domestic abuse assault. Pingel said the change would mean the offense would carry enhanced protections such as an automatic arrest policy, batterer's education for the offender, a criminal no-contact order and escalating penalties for a repeat offender.

'Twenty states across the country have this bill in place already, but not in Iowa, so that's a key piece of legislation we will continue to move on,” Pingel said.

While the measure passed the Senate unanimously last session, it failed to come up for a vote in the House.

However, advocates did gain a small victory this year in the form of a passage of a bill that would allow domestic violence victims to keep their addresses private. Victims will be able to register for the program through the secretary of state's office, where their mail will be routed and forwarded to their homes.

This means only the secretary of state's office would have access to the addresses, which can be sensitive information when an attacker wants to stalk their former partner.