California is living in a domestic violence ‘nightmare.’ Seattle could hold the solution
Lorinda sat next to her sleeping Boston terrier mix as she pored over the latest catalog of horrors: a domestic violence restraining order. Examining this particular document, she became increasingly alarmed.
The petitioner told the court that her partner had multiple guns, that he’d threatened to shoot her and that, shortly before she fled for her life, he forced her out of a car and actually fired a gun at her feet.
“What the hell,” Lorinda said. She works as a domestic violence advocate reporting to the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in Seattle, and she knew that these factors were all demonstrably linked to a higher risk of domestic violence turning lethal. Lorinda cursed loudly enough to wake the dog, feeling sickened and afraid.
But she knew what to do.
After taking a break to collect herself, Lorinda (The Bee is withholding her last name to protect her safety) called the woman to talk about the restraining order and her ex’s guns: Where did he keep them? How many were there? Then Lorinda called the sheriff’s office, and detectives went to find the dangerous man to take his guns away.
This common-sense approach in King County, Wash., could effectively be the norm everywhere in the U.S.: It is illegal under federal law for the subjects of certain domestic violence restraining orders to possess firearms. But most states — including California — have little to no proactive enforcement of restraining orders when it comes to removing firearms from abusers.
This sometimes fatal gap in law enforcement played out in Sacramento County Feb. 28 when a man under a domestic violence restraining order shot and killed his three young daughters and an adult man supervising their visit in an Arden Arcade church. Because of the order requested by the girls’ mother last year, the shooter, David Mora, was prohibited from possessing a weapon under state and federal law.
But like too many men formally accused of domestic violence in California, Mora still had a weapon despite the restraining order and the many red flags the girls’ mother described in her court filing, including that he choked her and explicitly threatened to kill her.
When Sacramento County’s district attorney acknowledged in 2019 that there was “no mechanism” to make sure abusers didn’t have guns, King County was already in year two of an aggressive enforcement protocol. Sandra Shanahan runs the King County Regional Domestic Violence Firearms Enforcement Unit to prevent tragedies similar to the killings in Arden Arcade. She’d looked up the news stories from Sacramento before speaking to The Bee and said, “That is our absolute worst nightmare that has happened in your community.”
Shanahan and Lorinda’s unit is a multidisciplinary, cross-jurisdictional team that works to remove guns from abusers as quickly as possible, ideally at the same time that the subject is served with the restraining order.
“We really try to be upstream, because we want to prevent the firearm tragedies from occurring,” Shanahan said. “We know that separation is a very, very dangerous time, so if we can try to mitigate that risk and reduce harm by removing the firearm immediately upon the court entering it, then we’re all safer for it.”
When police show up, more abusers hand over their guns
The numbers show, Shanahan said, that doing next to nothing wasn’t working particularly well in King County. In 2016, before Shanahan’s unit was established, 124 firearms were voluntarily surrendered to police by the subjects of restraining orders. In 2018, the first full year that the unit was operational, 592 were recovered — almost five times as many weapons. In 2019, 2020 and 2021, more than 700 guns were recovered each year.
Shanahan pointed out that the victims of domestic violence–related slayings aren’t just the partners and children of perpetrators. “Armed domestic violence offenders pose a risk to our entire community,” she said. “They don’t just kill intimate partners and their children and their loved ones. … These guys pose risks to you even if you’re not in a domestic violence situation.”
That was true of Feb. 28’s mass shooting in Arden Arcade, which also left a 59-year-old church elder dead. Nathaniel Kong had been supervising the shooter’s court-approved visit with the girls, 13-year-old Samia, 10-year-old Samantha and 9-year-old Samarah.
There’s a clear link overall between mass shootings and domestic violence. In one study of shootings that killed four or more people, researchers found that 59% of mass shootings were directly related to abuse. Another study from the journal Criminology & Public Policy found that of 89 mass shooters acting between 2014 and 2017, 28 seemed to have a history of abusing their partners or family members.
California state senator Susan Rubio knows the statistics; she said she believes it’s an urgent priority to ensure that people with a heightened likelihood of killing a family member or intimate partner do not have access to guns, which increase the risk of both murder and suicide.
“The reality is that we have laws in place. That’s a fact,” said Rubio, who represents a district in east Los Angeles County and has made domestic violence interventions a core part of her career. “The problem is the implementation and the enforcement.”
Proactive enforcement was years in the making
Poor follow-through used to undermine the law in King County, too. In 2014, Washington state passed a law that explicitly required perpetrators to surrender their guns to police once they were served with certain restraining orders; police would store the weapons for the duration of the restraining order. Although perpetrators were previously not allowed to possess firearms, there had not been a law mandating that they hand them over to law enforcement.
“For those of us who long worked on domestic violence cases, we thought, ‘Wow, today’s the day! We’re gonna be able to get these guns out of offenders’ hands and keep the survivors safe,’” Shanahan said. “What we found really quickly thereafter is, a law is great, but it takes effort and implementation to actually carry it forward and fulfill the promise that was made to the public.”
After Shanahan and county and city officials realized that they still had an enforcement problem, a retired Washington judge, Anne Levinson, was brought in to consult on the issue.
“We know which folks present the greatest risk of harm, and we know when,” Levinson said. “The purpose of these laws is to help save lives, and so we have to make sure that the system is designed and implemented in a way to achieve that outcome.”
Over two years, the city and county developed a plan for what became Shanahan’s unit. A pilot ran in 2017, and the unit launched in January 2018, jointly funded by the city of Seattle and King County.
Now, Shanahan’s team reviews incoming protective orders; investigates offenders’ links to firearms; interviews survivors; and works with police and courts to make sure the court orders are followed and the firearms are surrendered. Domestic violence advocates, including Lorinda, will fast-track higher-risk cases. A heightened awareness of firearms has been built into every step of the protective order system in King County: Victims are prompted repeatedly in the initial petition form to talk about firearms, and they’re informed that the judge must order the guns’ removal in many cases.
Shanahan used to work as an advocate herself, helping survivors request protective orders through the courts. “I remember,” she said, “that I would talk to an individual who would say, ‘I’m really concerned about the firearms.’” Shanahan was always honest in her response: “‘You can ask the court to order the person to surrender their firearms, but the reality is, nobody’s gonna go get them.’”
The survivors would slump, she said. Mostly, they didn’t want to file the additional petition with the court — what was the point? “It just became this black hole,” Shanahan said. Now, she’s “so grateful” that when her team talks to survivors, they can assure them that the police and courts are going to work together, and they’re not leaving it up to their abuser to voluntarily surrender weapons — which is mostly how the system still works in California.
Rubio, the California state senator, told The Bee that she was working on new solutions to keep domestic violence victims safer. She said she was looking at the policy in King County.
“If something’s being effective somewhere else, I don’t see why we shouldn’t explore it, number one,” she said, “and number two, why we shouldn’t replicate it.”
A commitment to safety — and law
Removing guns from violent people is not always simple.
Although Lorinda had flagged the case in which the woman’s ex had already fired a gun at her feet, detectives from the sheriff’s office had a hard time tracking him down, Lorinda said, because he was evading service. After a month, a detective finally made contact with him, and the perpetrator claimed that he didn’t have his guns anymore because he’d given them to his cousin.
“The detective says, ‘Okay, you’re gonna have to explain that to the judge,’” Lorinda said. The court held its regular firearm compliance review hearing following up with the subjects of restraining order cases, where the man explained that the guns were “safe” with his cousin.
“The judge says, ‘Nope,’” Lorinda said. “The judge gives him a deadline as to when he needs to surrender them (to law enforcement) by. And of course, he didn’t do it, and because he didn’t do it, the court initiates a contempt hearing for him … saying that ‘you need to have your cousin surrender or else.’ By the time (the) next hearing comes around, he surrendered four rifles.”
The whole process of recovering those four rifles took about three months, and Lorinda noted that it took nearly all the fail-safe measures to get this particular alleged abuser to give up his guns. But she counted it as a huge, potentially life-saving success.
Judges had previously made some efforts in King County to hold firearms compliance hearings, but that alone was not enough, Shanahan said; it took a coordinated effort from multiple fronts.
When the main enforcement tool was a court hearing, perpetrators would often just skip it, she said. But, “When we started the unit, and we started investigating these cases and sharing information, people were like, ‘Oh, gosh, somebody’s paying attention.’”
In King County, the coordination between prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, the firearms compliance unit and the courts has created “a culture of compliance,” Shanahan said, that did not exist before.
“All the coverage I have read so far about the situation in Sacramento is that it’s an honor system, and that’s absolutely what we had here in Washington state: You were told not to have (firearms), and it’s up to you to take them in when you can.
“The honor system,” Shanahan said, “begets no action.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
