FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

Terrorists are usually domestic abusers first

When Patricia Castillo first heard about the shooting last Sunday at a church in a small town half an hour from her home in South Texas, her first thought was, “When will we hear about the domestic violence?”

Castillo is a longtime community advocate in San Antonio, where she’s the executive director of The P.E.A.C.E. Initiative, a nonprofit counseling center for victims of domestic violence. Over her 37-year career, she says, she’s learned to never be surprised by the lengths domestic abusers will go to — and to assume that where there is the appearance of significant violence in society, there’s often an abused wife or child in the background.

It’s a link that experts on mass killing are only beginning to make. Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas, Omar Mateen in Orlando, James Hodgkinson in Washington, DC — each of them came from different backgrounds, with unrelated ideological impulses, but they had in common one thing: a history of domestic violence.

And Devin Kelley, the former Air Force airman who killed 26 people at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs on Sunday, fits the mold: In the years leading up to the tragedy, he’d been arrested for beating his dog and wife, convicted of assault, while he was in the Air Force, for breaking the skull of his infant stepson.

Castillo says this comes as no surprise to her. “What I’ve witnessed is that when we don’t intervene in these kinds of families, that’s when you see violence escalate,” she said. “If there is no intervention, then violence becomes more severe with the passage of time.”