When Violence Turns Deadly

The Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence makes sure victims are not forgotten. LCADV tracks domestic violence homicides, primarily through media reports, compiling critical data into a spreadsheet to monitor yearly trends, to inform the Coalition’s public policy work, and to confirm the accuracy of external reports. This is not a memorial list: It is a compilation of homicides based on criteria set forth by the Louisiana Domestic Violence Fatality Review Project, which defines a domestic violence fatality as a fatality that arises from an abuser’s efforts to seek power and control over his intimate partner. Using this broad definition, domestic violence fatalities in this list include:

• All homicides in which the victim was a current or former intimate partner of the perpetrator.
• Homicides in which the victim was someone other than the perpetrator’s intimate partner, but which occur in the context of domestic violence or in the context of a perpetrator attempting to kill an intimate partner (i.e., friend, family member, new intimate partner, law enforcement).
• Homicides occurring as an extension of or in response to ongoing intimate partner abuse (such as revenge killing of children).
• Suicides, other than the abuser’s, which may be a response to domestic violence.

LCADV also participates in the Louisiana Domestic Abuse Fatality Review Panel, a multidisciplinary panel housed in the Louisiana Department of Health. Through a comprehensive and multidisciplinary review of domestic abuse fatality cases at the state and local levels, LA-DAFR works to identify and characterize the scope and nature of domestic abuse fatalities in order to take action to prevent future fatalities.

According to the Violence Policy Center report, When Men Murder Women, viewable here, in 2020 Louisiana ranked fifth in the nation for the rate of women murdered by men.