Domestic Violence Headlines for Week of Sept. 15

Domestic violence headlines have become so routine they feel less like breaking news and more like a grim weather report: inevitable, familiar and devastating all the same.

Update: Investigators Suspect Travis Decker Remains Have Been Found 

Investigators believe human remains located in the woods near Leavenworth, Wash., are those of 32-year-old Travis Decker, accused of murdering his three young daughters back in June after he failed to return the children during a custody exchange. 

“While positive identification has not yet been confirmed, preliminary findings suggest the remains belong to Travis Decker,” the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said in a Thursday statement, according to CNN.

The remains were found at an elevation of 4,000 feet with the help of a drone, several miles from the campground where the bodies of his daughters, 5-year-old Olivia, 8-year-old Evelyn and 9-year-old Paityn were found on June 2, setting off a nationwide manhunt for Decker. 

Whitney Decker, the girls’ mother, filed for divorce from Travis at the end of 2022. Last September, she proposed a change to their custody agreement, noting Travis “neglected his parental duties toward a child” and stated, “Travis just keeps getting more and more unstable.” The family court judge continued to allow Travis unsupervised visitation.

Source: CNN.com

Eight Florida Sheriff’s Deputies Fired Over Handling of Domestic Violence Case

The Broward, Fla., Sheriff’s Office fired six additional officers late last week and brought disciplinary charges against 11 others, bringing the total number of officers let go to eight, all stemming from the handling of a case known as the triple Tamarac triple murder. Despite Mary Gingles repeated reports to sheriff’s deputies that she feared her estranged husband, Nathan Gingles, would kill her, deputies failed to follow up properly. On February 16, Nathan fatally shot his father-in-law, David Ponzer, as he was sipping coffee on the back patio of the family’s home. He then chased Mary down the street and killed her, as well as fatally shooting Andrew Ferrin, a neighbor whose home Mary fled to. Witnesses say the murders happened while the couple’s four-year-old daughter begged him to stop. 

“We had multiple opportunities to protect Mary during the months preceding her death when she alerted us to the domestic violence she was experiencing. The deputies and detectives assigned to investigate these cases failed their training and, ultimately, failed to handle Mary’s repeated cries for help with the urgency required,” CNN reported Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony said in a statement.

Before the murders, Nathan showed clear red flags of escalating his abuse. He violated his restraining order more than once and put a tracker on his wife’s car.

It appears deputies also failed to respond to Mary on the day of her murder. According to the timeline of events that day, despite the first 911 call coming in at 6:01 a.m., deputies first met at a “staging point” a half mile from the scene while Mary was still alive. A second call came into 911 at 6:06 when deputies had still not arrived. It took until 6:26 for deputies to arrive on scene and find the first victim, deceased. 

The percentage of domestic violence calls law enforcement will respond to during their career is significant; between 15-50 percent of all calls depending on the jurisdiction. And while police officers do receive domestic violence training, it's minimal, maybe 10 hours total, according to Mark Wynn, former police officer who now trains officers in violence against women prevention. 

“Police officers are missing an incredible amount of crimes within domestic violence. Many victims [of domestic violence] … are also victims of intimate partner sexual assault, witness intimidation, strangulation, kidnapping and sexual assault.” The problem, he says, is that survivors have a hard time trusting police. And police have a difficult time earning that trust.

Calling the police should typically be a lifesaving decision for survivors, not another obstacle to safety. Learn how to report domestic violence to police without fear in “Calling the Police Shouldn’t Be Another Barrier.” 

Source: CNN.com, Police1.com

Man Sets Fire to House, Killing Daughter and Injuring Wife

In Castle Shannon, Penn., this past Sunday, 46-year-old Brian Shelleby reportedly told his estranged wife Carly Shelleby that he was going to “burn the house down” as he poured gasoline into the garage, basement and first floor. Neighbors report they heard the house explode. When firefighters arrived, they extracted Carly and the couple’s 19-year-old daughter, Lakyn Shelleby. Carly was transported to the hospital in stable condition, while Lakyn was pronounced dead at the scene.

Carly told police that she informed her husband he could no longer stay at the house before he started the lethal fire. Brian is now being held without bond on charges of criminal homicide and aggravated arson. 

Brian isn’t the only abuser to utilize this deadly tactic on his victims. Audrey Prosper was a Purple Ribbon Award winner in 2022 as Survivor of the Year for her outspoken advocacy despite the fact that her ex-husband attempted to kill her in 2009 by lighting her on fire after assaulting her with a hammer. At the time, the 26-year-old mom-of-two young children knew she couldn’t give up and was able to lift a garage door despite being engulfed in flames from the waist down. 

Prosper told DomesticShelters.org, “When I woke up alive in the hospital, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude.” It would be, in her words, the flame that ignited a whole new type of fire, a vow to herself that she refused to let this incident take anything else from her. 

“It doesn’t mean that I wasn’t depressed or angry, it just helped me position my mindset in such a way that one could overcome what I experienced.”

Abusers like Brian who resort to familicide —the attempted killing, or completed killing of not just their partner, but also their children and sometimes themselves—are more common than we want to believe. The Indy Star newspaper did a thorough investigation of family annihilations in 2023, with data from the Gun Violence Archive, and found that one occurred every five days in the U.S. since 2020.  To learn more read, “Familicide: When Abusers Kill Their Families and Sometimes, Themselves.”

Source: WTAE.com

Bodies of a Mother and Her Two Young Children Pulled from Lake Michigan

On Saturday, the bodies of a woman and two young children were pulled from Lake Michigan, believed to be the victims of domestic violence. They were identified as 31-year-old Drake Patton, 6-year-old Wyatt Bryden Patton and 1-year-old Jream Jaycee Washington who have been identified by family members as being Drake’s children. Police say they their deaths are likely connected to a “domestic dispute,” otherwise known as the ongoing public health crisis of violence against women. So far, no suspect has been named.

It’s estimated that one in three women around the world will be the victims of physical or sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization, which calls violence against women specifically “a major public health problem.” Combine that with the fact that worldwide, on average, it’s estimated that a woman or girl is killed every 11 minutes by someone in her own family. And that’s just the female victims. The National Crime Victimization study found that men make up nearly a quarter of domestic violence victims with one in seven men over age 18 having experienced severe physical violence by a partner. 

Alicia Nichols, LSW, Deputy Director of the National Center on Gun Violence in Relationships at the Battered Women’s Justice Project says she “most definitely,” would consider domestic violence a public health crisis, despite it not yet formally being named as such.

“Domestic violence, intimate partner violence, gender-based violence—no matter what we call it … have long-lasting, far-reaching and often devastating consequences for individuals, their families and entire communities,” says Nichols. 

The children’s father, Drake’s ex-boyfriend Brandon Washington, who is not being investigated regarding the deaths, told the local news station he called police asking for a welfare check the night before his children were found dead. 

"She was too young to go. She didn't even explore," Washington said of his daughter. "She didn't even see the world, or my little dude, he didn't even see it.”

Sources: NBCChicago.com, CBSNews.com

Domestic Violence Murders Up in Savannah, Police Say They Can’t Predict Them

Savannah, Ga., police reported this week that while domestic violence calls have decreased in 2025 compared to last year, the number of fatalities related to domestic violence have increased.  Savannah police say they have responded to 251 calls of domestic violence so far this year, and have seen six domestic violence homicides as of September, the most since 2019. In 2024, there were only three domestic violence deaths. Georgia saw 159 domestic violence-related murders total in 2024. 

Detective Constance Hogan says it’s difficult for the SPD to know which abusers will escalate to homicide. “You can’t really predict what someone is capable of because we don’t everything that that victim is necessarily going through.”

However, some advocates argue the opposite, saying that early intervention and danger assessments can save lives. In 1986, domestic violence researcher Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, developed something called The Danger Assessment. Through input from law enforcement, experts on abuse and domestic violence survivors themselves, she compiled 20 questions that she said could predict the lethality risk a victim of abuse was currently facing. For decades, Campbell’s tool has been used by police and advocates to help predict the level of risk a survivor is currently facing and how likely she is of being killed by her partner in the near future. 

Another assessment tool widely used by law enforcement to measure the threat a survivor is under is called MOSIAC, created by security issues specialist Gavin de Becker, author of Gift of Fear. This questionnaire rates a victim’s situation from 1 to 10, comparing their circumstances to other situations similar to it, and providing information as to how similar situations have played out, whether they’ve increased in severity or escalated to homicide. 

Women are most in danger when they’re in the process of leaving an abuser or right after they escape. 

“Abusers feel like they’re losing control that they once had. That’s when women are most likely to be killed,” Tami Sullivan, director of family violence research and programs at Yale University, told DomesticShelters.org.

Source: WTOC.com