Domestic violence a grim statistic

Katrina Hampton’s body was found on the floor of the home she shared with her husband, wrapped in a blanket and spattered with blood.

She’d been there a week before her mother found her on Jan. 21, 2018. Two months later, Little Rock police charged Katrina’s husband with murder.

“I knew right away he did it,” Helen Hampton said. “I knew it was him.”

The 34-year-old woman’s death added to a grim statistic in Little Rock, as well as across the country.

Between 2014 and Oct. 1 of this year, 259 people died in Little Rock homicides. Of those, 59, roughly 23%, were domestic violence killings, meaning the killer was the victim’s spouse, parent, child, roommate or domestic partner. Aside from slayings in which the Police Department has not revealed a motive, domestic violence is the most common motive for homicides in Little Rock.

In the months leading up to October, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reviewed five years’ worth of homicide data and found that 43% of homicide suspects

have histories of domestic violence — regardless of whether they killed family members or intimate partners.

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that more than 10 million men and women in the United States are victims of domestic violence each year. Arkansas is among the 20 states with the highest rate of domestic violence against women and in the top 10 in domestic violence against men, according to the coalition.

Intimate partner violence leads to homicides more often than other forms of domestic violence, and women are the most common victims, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s ongoing study on intimate partner homicide.

Arkansas ranks third nationally in the number of women killed by men, according to the Violence Policy Center’s study of 2017 homicides. In Little Rock, more than 55% of domestic violence homicides between 2015 and 2019 involved the death of a woman.

Kandi Hause, Victims Service Program coordinator for the Little Rock Police Department, said the data surrounding domestic violence will never truly represent the problem because many victims never report their abuse. The picture, she said, will always be incomplete.

The domestic abuse problem is such that when the Little Rock Police Department received about $1.2 million in grants this year, part of that money went to hiring a detective specifically to investigate domestic violence cases, and another several thousand dollars helped hire a victim services specialist to focus on domestic abuse.

“We could do more in law enforcement,” Little Rock Police Chief Keith Humphrey said. “Not necessarily in Little Rock, in law enforcement as a whole. These numbers are not getting any better, as a matter of fact, each year, they grow. And these are the numbers that are reported to us. It makes me wonder how many are not.”

HIDDEN ABUSE

Katrina Hampton never told her mother when her husband, Wade Williams, began abusing her. She excused the bruises, made up a story about her limp and said she’d had a cooking accident to justify the burn on her palm.

It was only after she died that Helen Hampton said her daughter’s friends began telling her the truth. Williams had beaten her, pushed her down and kicked her, told her to stick her hand in burning oil while he held a gun to her head.

Many of the abuses happened while Katrina was pregnant with their daughter.

“Why didn’t they tell me?” her mother asked recently. “Why did they wait till she was dead to say something?”

Experts say domestic abusers rarely kill the first time they hit, kick or choke a partner. The incidents often start small. The first outburst may seem isolated — a combination of factors that lead up to the person lashing out.

“We know from working from these victims, the first time they call police is not the first time there’s been an incident of physical abuse,” Hause said. “It’s the first time it rose to the occasion that they felt like they need police intervention.”

Victims sometimes stay because their partners apologize, saying it will never happen again. In other cases, the victim may feel that he or she does not have the money to leave. Many, like Katrina Hampton, fear their partners so much that they feel it’s not safe to leave.

After her daughter’s death, Helen said she was angry that some news media portrayed her daughter as an addict who never removed herself from an abusive relationship.

Beth Goodrich, executive director of the Arkansas Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said blaming the victim for the perpetrator’s actions is common only in two crimes: intimate partner violence and sexual assault.

“‘Why don’t they just leave?’ is, in all my history in working in this field, the most common question people ask me,” Goodrich said. “We do this thing as a society where we get really angry, and we focus that anger on victim behaviors.”

“Our problem there is we’re not focusing on who is doing the crime.”

LAPSE AND BREAK-IN

Helen Hampton said Williams manipulated her daughter into doing things she would not have done otherwise. Katrina, who struggled with drug abuse in her teens and 20s, had gone to therapy before she met Williams in 2015.

“She was going back to school,” Helen said. “Her life was finally going back up … and then he came around.”

When Williams entered her daughter’s life, Helen said hardship followed. Katrina relapsed into drug use, the state took away her children and, once, Williams persuaded her to break into a neighbor’s home.

“He made her do that,” Helen said. “She told me he made her do that. She said she never realized how much power he had over her.”

Katrina wrote a letter to her neighbors after the arrest begging them to forgive her. Investigators found the note on the kitchen counter after her death. Her mother said she didn’t know if the letter was ever delivered.

“No words can express how I feel … for the damage I have caused,” she wrote. “I want to apologize for what I did.”

Howard Turney, a social work professor at the University of Arkansas Little Rock and family therapist, said many abusers isolate their victims from their relatives, friends and peers.

“We all need relationships, and when you get isolated away … you tend to become internal and really