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Domestic violence protections fall short

4 min read

We have long believed our justice system does too little to protect people, mostly women, who are the victims of domestic violence. Many of them end up being abused again. Some of them die.

Such was the fate of 20-year-old Alina Sheykhet, a Pitt student who was brutally murdered earlier this month in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, allegedly by her former boyfriend, 21-year-old Matthew Darby of Greensburg. For what it’s worth – and it wasn’t worth much – Sheykhet had a temporary restraining order against Darby to keep him away from her home.

After hearing more details about Darby’s alleged recent criminal history, we wonder why he was on the streets. He should have been behind bars.

Darby was charged in March with raping another former girlfriend in Indiana County. He was freed on a paltry $10,000 bond in that case. Then, in September, after Sheykhet had broken up with him, Darby allegedly climbed a downspout and broke through the second-floor window of her home. “He did this because I left him and stopped answering his phone calls,” Sheykhet said in her request for the restraining order.

Darby was charged with trespassing in that incident, but despite the charges pending against him in Indiana County, he remained a free man. And Oct. 8, police said, he broke into the basement of Sheykhet’s home, grabbed knives and a claw hammer, and murdered her.

According to a Friday story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Indiana County officials have said that an electronic notification promptly alerted them to the trespassing charge, but did not include details. They opted not to consider pretrial incarceration until after the new case’s preliminary hearing, which had not yet occurred.”

So, the system worked, up to a point. Indiana County authorities were made aware that someone from their jurisdiction who was accused of raping a woman had been arrested in another county. What we have here is an egregious lack of curiosity about the details of the Allegheny County case. A simple phone call to police in Pittsburgh would have provided them with information we hope would have led them to seek an immediate revocation of Darby’s bond, and his arrest. Had they done so, Sheykhet might be alive today.

State Victim Advocate Jennifer R. Storm told the P-G, “I don’t know about you, but (a trespassing charge is) going to prompt me to investigate further. If they’d inquired, they would have found he was at the bedroom door of a young female. That should send anyone’s skin crawling. He has trespassed and come to the door of another female. He should have been incarcerated.”

Storm had several suggestions for reducing the risk that someone free on pretrial bond will commit new crimes, including better sharing of information among law-enforcement agencies and allowing police to make immediate, on-sight arrests of someone suspected of violating bail conditions. Now, prosecutors have to seek either an arrest warrant or a bond-revocation hearing before a judge, options that take more time, the P-G noted in a recent report.

We also would hope this most recent domestic violence homicide would spur the state House of Representatives to take action on a Senate-passed bill, sponsored by state Sen. Camera Bartolotta, that would give judges more leeway to keep domestic violence suspects behind bars if there is fear that the person will strike again. The bill is named for Tierne Ewing, a West Finley Township woman murdered last year by her estranged husband, who was free on bond after holding her against her will and brutalizing her over a 12-day period earlier that year.

Sadly, no matter what steps are taken, deadly domestic violence cannot be eradicated. But surely we can do more to reduce the frequency of these incidents.

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