Building a SAFeR System: Preventing Tragedy in Child Custody Outcomes
By Kaitlyn Baker, Intern, National Legal Center on Children and Domestic Violence When the justice system fails to protect its…
Once Every 16 Hours, An American Woman Is Fatally Shot by a Current or Former Romantic Partner
On Thursday, January 28, Tania Adams, a 41-year-old mother of three, was gunned down by her estranged husband in the clubhouse of a planned community she worked at in Homestead, Florida. He then wounded one of her co-workers before fatally shooting himself. According to a fundraising drive set up to help pay for her funeral expenses, Adams had left the man, whose name was not released, around Christmas. By then he’d allegedly threatened her life “numerous times.”
The next evening, 44-year-old Cheryl Snyder Tremmel was shot several times in Hemitage, Pennsylvania while attempting to move out on her husband. As she lay dying of her wounds, Edward Tremmel, texted her father, “I’m sorry that it has to end this way,” then shot himself in the head.
The day after that, on a Saturday night, 23-year-old Ashley Jones was shot and killed along with her boyfriend at her home in Newark, New Jersey. Jeffrey Holland, the 27-year-old father of two of Jones’s children, was arrested for the shooting. A neighbor said Jones had gotten a restraining order against Holland a week earlier, after an argument left her face bruised.
For American women, those incidents amount to a typically fatal stretch. According to FBI and state crime data analyzed by the Associated Press, at least 6,875 people were fatally shot by romantic partners from 2006 to 2014. Eighty percent of those victims were women. On average, that works out to 554 annual fatal shootings of an American woman by a current or former romantic partner during the nine years examined, or one every 16 hours.