Shooting on campus

[randy_byers]

There was a shooting on campus earlier this morning. Looks like a guy was stalking his ex-girlfriend who had gone through a number of maneuvers, both logistical and legal, to keep him away from her. She was, rightly, afraid for her life. He killed her and then killed himself. Why don't these asshole losers just kill themselves? It makes me sick to my stomach.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I hadn't yet seen anybody say it was his ex-girlfriend. The PI says she had sought a restraining order that had somehow not been served. What a horror.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

The PI is now reporting more detail, which backs up what I'd seen on the Stranger's blog:

A woman shot to death on the University of Washington campus Monday morning had lived in mortal fear for weeks about a man who was stalking her, her friends and co-workers said.

Her attacker apparently killed himself.after killing the woman The woman had changed her telephone numbers, moved a couple of times and e-mailed to co-workers in the UW's real estate program a description and photograph of her stalker, said Lance Nguyen, a graduate student in urban planning who worked with the woman. The 26-year-old woman worked in the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies at the UW.

"She was visually shaken and scared,' said Nguyen. He said the man had threatened to harm her and her family.

The woman had, at times, worked from home because she was afraid to come to work. She also had considered riding her bike to work so she could vary her route, Nguyen said.

George Rolfe, a real estate professor, said the woman had recently sought a restraining order against the man but that for some reason the order couldn't be served on him.

It looks as though the only place he could find her was at work.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Times was picking up details even before the PI. It's always a slow trickle of information/disinformation when you're this close to breaking news. Actually, it's always like that, but when it affects you, it's really irksome to get it drip by drip.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

One of the legal lessons of sad incidents like this is that in such cases, increasing draconian punishments doesn't work. I'm not thinking so much of restraining orders, though it applies to that too, as to stiffening the sentences and punishments for murder. What could be tougher than an immediate death sentence? Yet this is the penalty these killers inflict on themselves. Surely nothing that law enforcement could throw at them would deter.

Sure, it'd be easier if they'd just kill themselves first. And, in fact, a lot of people do just that.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I wasn't advocating any changes to the law. Mostly I was expressing despair. That woman did everything she could to protect herself, and she still got murdered. It just makes me feel helpless. I guess she should have quit her job too. Fuck.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was not trying to rebut anything I thought you said; I was just making that observation, another facet of the despair at our inability to prevent things like this.

No, at least without perfect hindsight I wouldn't have advised her to leave her job. You can't contort your life in fear.

The real solution would have been not to have gotten involved with a guy like that in the first place, but as it was already too late for her to do anything about that, the only value of such an observation would be to consider warning signs that might help future women.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've known two women who were involved with "guys like that." One escaped only by going through a women's shelter and then hooking up with a guy who essentially knocked down the abuser/stalker once when he still came after her and said if he ever saw him again he'd do worse. Both of these women had been sexually abused as kids and became substance-abusers as teenagers. It does seem that there's got to be a way that we can help women who get into these situations better than we are currently doing, but I'm not sure what it is, short of hiring armed bodyguards for them.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

One could always teach them to shoot, and generally validate their perception of danger and their right to protect themselves. In the particular case, possibly also encourage them to go ahead and press charges when ex-boyfriend makes a threat. That's something the victim refused to do.

The problem is, people who have been in abusive relationships before are likely to have hardwired 'survival' strategies that involve placating and being nice, and which need to be overcome when dealing with someone who would actually kill them.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

According to yesterday's newspaper stories, the claim that she refused to press charges (made by a UW official) was false. She was willing to press charges, and there was some kind of fuck up/miscommunication within the UW Police. From the headlines, it appears there's more about this in the Seattle Times today.

None of which necessarily contradicts your general points.