http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawa-womans-name-added-to-a-long-list-of-spousal-murder-suicide-victims
Ottawa woman's name added to a long list of spousal murder-suicide victims
ROBERT SIBLEYMore from Robert Sibley
Published on: December 8, 2014Last Updated: December 8, 2014 8:35 AM EST
In the same weekend Canadians marked the 25th anniversary of the Montreal
Massacre, in which 14 women were murdered, Ottawans were informed of the
identity of yet another woman’s death at the hands of a man.
Alem Haile was found stabbed to death in the basement of her Gloucester
home early Thursday morning. Police also found the hanged body of her
husband, Yassin Mender, in the house.
Investigators described the deaths as murder-suicide — the city’s seventh
homicide of the year. The couple, aged 51 and 60, respectively, had three
children.
Prior domestic violence is by far the No. 1 risk factor in these cases.
Police and paramedics descended on the couple’s residence in the Beaconwood
Village complex along Naskapi Drive in Gloucester at about 6:30 a.m. after
one of the children, 16-year-old Ben Mender, called police after finding
his parents’ bodies. An hour earlier, he’d locked himself in his bedroom
following his father’s attempt to stab him.
The couple, originally from the African country of Eritrea, were known to
police, who had been been previously called to their residence. But they
were not known to the domestic assault unit.
For their part, neighbours said they knew little about the couple, but
neither saw nor heard anything to suggest extreme violence. “You start
thinking what you could have done if you had noticed any signs,” Phara
Vincent, a health crisis nurse who lives in the Beaconwood complex. “We
never noticed any domestic disputes or anything like that.”
Such tragedies, experts say, are uncommon, and hard to anticipate, much
less prevent. There were 344 murder-suicides in Canada between 2001 and
2011, according to a 2013 Statistics Canada report. More than
three-quarters — 77 per cent — involved at least one victim related to the
accused.
Spouses accounted for the largest proportion of these murder-suicides, with
women and those aged 15 to 24 having the highest risk of being victims. In
97 per cent of cases of spousal murder-suicide, the accused were men.
Shooting was the most common cause of death in spousal murder-suicides,
with more than half — 53 per cent — of the victims dying from gunshots.
This was followed by stabbing at 22 per cent.
Psychologists and criminologists say that regardless of the relative rarity
of spousal murder-suicides, there are some discernable patterns —
everything from a wife seeking a divorce from an angry and insecure husband
and a man feeling humiliated at the failure of his marriage, to a husband
who has previously vented suicidal or homicidal inclinations.
A recent American study by Jacquelyn Campbell of Johns Hopkins University
determined that intimate-partner violence had previously occurred in 70 per
cent of murder-suicide cases. “Prior domestic violence is by far the No. 1
risk factor in these cases,” she says.
Wife murders aren’t, for the most part, crimes of passion, but the endpoint
of longtime predisposing factors in the life of the man involved, says
American psychologist David Adams, author of Why Do They Kill? Men Who
Murder Their Intimate Partners. “Many elements of their crimes are foretold
by their past behaviour in intimate relationships.
“The most common type of killer was a possessively jealous type,” he says.
Many of the men who commit murder-suicide, as well as those who kill their
children, seem to fit that profile. “The killers don’t perceive a viable
life for themselves beyond the relationship.”
Other experts point out that spousal murder-suicides are often
characterized either by a husband who seeks to control the relationship,
physically, economically and psychologically, or who closely identifies his
wife’s life with that of his own.
Such men, who may already have suicidal tendencies, feel they can only kill
themselves after killing their families, says Richard Gelles, a sociologist
at the University of Pennsylvania. They base their sense of self-worth on
the success of their marriage and socio-economic status. “Their suicide is
an all-encompassing suicide. They don’t see that their life is different
from the lives of their family.”
Received on Mon Dec 08 2014 - 20:14:19 EST