WA) Slain woman sought court’s help – Yeah, let the police and a piece of paper protect you…….
WA) Slain woman sought court’s help
Yeah, let the police and a piece of paper protect you…….
Slain woman sought court’s help
This story was published 8/12/2001
By Janine Jobe
Herald staff writer
Nearly two months to the day after a Tri-City judge denied a restraining order against her estranged husband, Maria Avila-Lopez was shot to death in the parking lot of her Pasco apartment complex.
In applying for the no-contact order, the 21-year-old woman wrote, “I am very afraid of him because he has told me he’d rather see me dead than with someone else.”
Avila-Lopez was shot three times in the chest with a .357-caliber handgun July 28 before her husband, Ruben Torres, 26, turned the gun on himself, investigators say.
Their 4-year-old daughter, Blanca A. Torres, was shot in the stomach, and remains in satisfactory condition at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in Tacoma. She is in the custody of Child Protective Services and is expected to recover.
In her request for help, Avila- Lopez wrote that the couple had been married six years and started having problems about a year ago.
“Every time I try to leave him, he threatens to kill himself,” she wrote. “The last time he threatened to kill himself, he put a gun to his head. I took the gun away from him.”
On May 14, she told Torres she wasn’t in love with him, according to court documents. She was living at an apartment at 2210 W. Henry Place and he lived elsewhere in Pasco.
That day, Torres took their daughter and refused to return her. The following day, Avila-Lopez filed for a restraining order and was granted a temporary one ordering Torres to return his daughter and stay 150 feet away from Avila-Lopez.
“It’s not uncommon for domestic violence to escalate this way, from threatening suicide to using children,” said Tom Morgan, general manager for Columbia Basin Domestic Violence Services.
“He gets tired of beating on her because she has gotten over fighting back, and he doesn’t get the emotional rise out of her anymore — he clearly has her under control. Then he turns on the kids.
“That’s when we see many women finally look for help and try to get restraining orders. It’s when the maternal instinct kicks in.”
But two weeks later at a hearing to determine if the restraining order should be made permanent, Superior Court Judge Vic VanderSchoor denied the petition, noting there had been “no recent domestic violence.”
VanderSchoor is on vacation until Thursday and could not be reached about the case.
“In a judge’s defense, they are put in a difficult position. They have to make their best call based on the facts and what they are told. In this case, (Avila-Lopez) didn’t offer any evidence that she had been hit or locked in a closet or anything,” Morgan said.
“I think there was enough reason, though, enough doubt, to say, ‘Hey, we need to take a look at this.’ But it’s a tough call.”
It’s believed the couple moved to the Tri-City area about a year ago from Mexico. Torres didn’t have a criminal record in either Benton or Franklin counties.
Generally, Columbia Basin Domestic Violence Services and domestic violence advocates at Franklin and Benton county prosecutors’ offices are successful in getting restraining orders.
“About 99.9 percent of the time we get it. They really aren’t that hard to get,” Morgan said.
Also, if a person isn’t successful in getting a restraining order the first time, advocates at the agency look at what was wrong with the original petition and help victims file a new one.
The agency even will help people who are illegal aliens and provide shelter for abused women and their children.
“We’re not whistleblowers,” Morgan said. “The (Immigration and Naturalization Service) knows we help illegal aliens without turning them over, and they are fine with that.”
Even if a woman violates the protection order and takes an abuser back into her home, she should reach out for help if the abuse starts again, Morgan said.
“Call the police. Call us. No one is perfect, and no one should have to die for an error in judgment,” Morgan said.
It was a year ago in May when another Pasco woman, Tara Jensen, received a protection order against her husband, James Bennett Jensen.
Four months later, she allowed him to move back in. One night following an argument, she kicked him out again. He broke into the house, chased her across the yard and gunned her down while she beat on a neighbor’s door for help.
“If she would have called us, we would have talked to her about whether letting him move back in was the wise thing to do,” Morgan said. “Throughout the whole thing, there were inferences that (Tara Jensen) was somehow partly to blame because she violated her own restraining order. She made a mistake, but she shouldn’t have died for it.”
James Jensen was sentenced to 31 years in prison.
The domestic violence hotline is 800-648-1277 or 582-9841.
n Reporter Janine Jobe can be reached at 582-1543 or via e-mail at jjobe@tri- cityherald.com.
