Domestic murder-suicides make up half of Henderson’s homicides

It seemed like a typical quiet night in Henderson’s gated Liberty at Paradise community.

It was just another Thursday after all, resident Dee Don recalled the next morning. Residents were coming home from work. Kids were playing in the street. People were walking their dogs.

But then the sound of gunshots echoed through the community, and soon after, a billow of smoke rose in the sky above 1146 Paradise Garden Drive.

When officers arrived, four people were dead. A 35-year-old mother and her two sons, ages 5 and 15, had been shot by a 27-year-old man before he turned the gun on himself. The Henderson Police Department has not said how the house caught on fire.

It would be the first of two murder-suicide investigations that night for Henderson police. Just before midnight, officers found a 42-year-old woman was dead from a gunshot wound and a 39-year-old man dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a home near Robindale Road and Eastern Avenue.

The particularly bloody Thursday was a chilling reminder that domestic violence does not discriminate — not even against the city of Henderson, which has consistently been touted as among the nation’s safest cities.

“Intimate partner violence is not isolated to any particular economic, gender, race, ethnic, cultural or religious group,” said Rita Hayes, a criminal justice professor at College of Southern Nevada’s Henderson campus. Before teaching, Hayes worked in law enforcement for 20 years and investigated domestic crimes such as stalking, harassment, sexual assault and sex crimes against children. “It can be found in opposite sex relationships or same-sex relationships.

As of Saturday morning, Henderson police had investigated 14 homicides this year, including fatal police shootings, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal records. Half of those killings were domestic murder-suicides.

The year before, there was one domestic murder-suicide in Henderson, although police said six of the 10 total homicides in 2017 were connected to domestic violence. And before that, in 2016, eight of nine homicides involved domestic violence, according to police records.

So far this year in the seven cases of domestic murder-suicides, five women were killed by men armed with guns.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, one in three female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners, and about 35 percent of all women killed by men in the country are killed by intimate partners with guns.

The youngest of the women was 35 and the oldest 81. Two of them were older than 60.

“It is thought that the violence ending in homicides or homicide-suicides occur to older victims as the abuse has been going on for a longer period of time. Or possibly, if the victim has gained some control by leaving the relationship, the abuse can escalate,” Hayes added.

The remaining two victims of this year’s murder-suicides in Henderson were the two boys killed Thursday. One in 15 children nationally are exposed to intimate partner violence each year, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Domestic abuse also can take form outside the typical dating relationship, according to Hayes.

“The homicides or homicide-suicides can also be seen in caregiver situations where depression or desperation become factors,” she said.

According to Nevada Revised Statute 33.018, domestic violence includes any relatives by blood or marriage and people who live together.

A request for comment from Henderson police spokesman Lt. Kirk Moore was not returned before publication of this story.

Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.