06/09/2026
The advice given to women in abusive relationships is almost always the same: get out. Leave him. Take the kids and go. It sounds like safety. But researchers who study these killings have found something crueler -- that the act of leaving is often what gets a woman killed. By some estimates, three-quarters of women murdered by their partners die as they try to leave or in the period after they already have.
"Abusers feel like they're losing control that they once had," said Tami Sullivan, director of family violence research and programs at Yale University. "That's when women are most likely to be killed."
In the first two days of June, three fathers murdered their families. In Muscatine, Iowa, authorities say Ryan McFarland shot his wife, four of his children, and two other relatives before killing himself. In Cheektowaga, New York, police say Saleh Mohamed shot his 26-year-old wife, their two small sons, ages 4 and 3, and a grocery store clerk. And in Doral, Florida, Ryan Whiten is accused of stabbing his ex-wife, Melanie Hyer, and their 8 and 11-year-old daughters, before killing himself. Three men killed thirteen people, including their own children, in under 48 hours.
Three such killings in two days is not a coincidence. America has been growing less violent -- homicides have fallen for four straight years, with one stubborn exception. Domestic violence deaths have stayed high, and the most extreme form of all is getting worse.
Mass family killings, in which someone murders four or more of their own, have risen sharply from a two-decade low, and the first half of 2026 has already brought more of them than all of last year, according to data from Northeastern University.
Family and partner killings now account for 21 percent of all U.S. homicides, up from 15 percent in 2020. As violence recedes nearly everywhere else, it's growing in the one place a woman is supposed to feel safest: her home.
The officials who spoke after last week's murders called the killings "evil," "unimaginable," the work of a monster no one could have seen coming. Researchers who study domestic homicide have another way to describe such deaths: preventable. Such murders, they maintain, follow a grimly consistent script: a man, almost always, and a gun, far more often than not.
At the root of it, researchers say, is control -- the abuser's sense that his partner and children are his to command. Most of these men have a documented history of abusing the partner before the killing, and leaving is so dangerous precisely because it is the moment that control is refused. "Another way to hurt her," the Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox has said, "is to hurt the children."
Such murders rarely come without warning. The tool researchers use to gauge how close an abused woman is to being killed points to a consistent cluster of danger signs -- among the sharpest, a partner who has threatened to kill her, who has access to a gun, or who has brandished a weapon before. A woman whose partner has threatened to kill her is nearly fifteen times more likely to be murdered than one who has been abused without such threats.
The single factor that most reliably turns abuse into death is a gun in the home. Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell, the Johns Hopkins nurse-researcher who built that assessment tool, found that a firearm makes the death of an abused woman roughly five times more likely. The danger, she argues, is how fast these killings happen -- how often a life ends in a single impulsive moment. It is the case for safe-storage laws, which require guns to be locked away rather than left loaded and within reach.
"I have reviewed way too many gun homicide records when a gun gets picked up in a moment of crazy rage," Campbell has said, "and if someone had to think about it for a minute -- if we could slow down the impulsive acts -- lives could be saved."
A lock buys critical minutes. The more direct protection is keeping the gun away from the abuser altogether -- which is why federal law bars people convicted of domestic violence, or under a domestic-violence restraining order, from owning one, a restriction the Supreme Court upheld in 2024. Yet that protection only works if it is enforced, and the Trump administration's Justice Department has spent this year loosening the federal gun rules that do the enforcing -- the largest rollback in more than a decade. The laws meant to disarm dangerous men are being weakened at the very moment the death toll is rising.
Which is why "just leave" was never the whole answer. A woman can do everything she's told -- the restraining order, the new town, the locked door -- and still die, because her safety was never hers alone to secure. It belongs to the courts that hear her, the laws that decide whether the man threatening her keeps his gun, and everyone who chooses to ignore his threats.
We keep calling these killings unimaginable. The youngest victim over these two days was only three years old. There is nothing unimaginable about it. We have just chosen, as a country, not to treat it as the emergency it is.
--> To support domestic violence programs nationwide and the fight to keep guns out of abusers' hands, you can contribute to The National Network to End Domestic Violence at https://nnedv.org
--> To call for stronger gun safety protections -- including closing the remaining "boyfriend loophole," passing safe-storage requirements, and backing laws that let courts disarm someone who has threatened to kill -- visit Everytown for Gun Safety at https://everytown.org
--> If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.
--> The Danger Assessment, developed by Dr. Jacquelyn Campbell, is a free tool that helps a woman gauge her risk of being killed by an abusive partner -- https://www.dangerassessment.org/DA.aspx
For a potentially life-saving book for older teens and adults about the early warning signs of abusive relationships, myths about abusive personalities, and how to get help, we highly recommend "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" at https://www.amightygirl.com/why-does-he-do-that
To teach younger children -- girls and boys alike -- about asserting their own boundaries and respecting the boundaries of others, we highly recommend "Let's Talk About Body Boundaries, Consent, and Respect" for ages 4 to 7 (https://www.amightygirl.com/body-boundaries) and "Consent (for Kids!)" for ages 6 to 10 (https://www.amightygirl.com/consent-for-kids)
For two excellent books about a tween girls' experience with sexual harassment - both for 10 and up - check out "Maybe He Just Likes You" (https://www.amightygirl.com/maybe-he-just-likes-you) and "That's What Friends Do" (https://www.amightygirl.com/that-s-what-friends-do)
If youâre a parent concerned that your daughter may be in an unhealthy relationship, check out the books âBut I Love Him: Protecting Your Teen Daughter from Controlling, Abusive Relationshipsâ (https://www.amightygirl.com/but-i-love-him) and âSaving Beauty From The Beast: How to Protect Your Daughter from an Unhealthy Relationshipâ (https://www.amightygirl.com/saving-beauty-from-the-beast)
To read more about the three family murders in two days in The Washington Post, visit https://wapo.st/43UakzX
