After telling court officials that her father was violent and threatened to kill her, a mother who lost her three children this week in a Sacramento County church shooting received a restraining or against him last year.
The father, David Mora, 39, shot and killed his three daughters — ages 9, 10 and 13 — and a church official who had agreed to supervise the visits, before fatally shooting himself, according to law enforcement officials, the coroner’s office and court records.
The shooting on Monday came after Mr. Mora’s partner of 15 years described his history of violence in court documents filed in late April 2021. The New York Times withheld the name of the woman. On Wednesday, she did not return a phone call.
The order was granted in May 2021 and provided that Mr. Mora could visit his children. It also prohibited him from possessing or purchasing firearms.
Mr. Mora “said that he has not killed me because he would not know where to go with the children,” the woman said in court documents. She added: “I am scared and nervous. I am afraid Respondent is going to hurt me.”
The woman also stated that Mr. Mora had abused her physically in the presence of their children.
She claimed that the most recent abuse occurred in their home on April 17th, 2021. The couple got into an argument after the woman stated that she wanted to quit her job selling tamales to clean homes. She said that Mr. Mora did not want her doing that. “He threw a ball at me,” she wrote. “He grabbed my right arm and pushed me” and “he was acting crazy.”
According to the woman, she called a friend from church and picked her up. The next day, she called the police. Mr. Mora, she wrote, “had been expressing a desire to kill himself,” and he was “admitted into the hospital for a week and treated for psychosis.”
The woman claimed that she and her children moved from the house they shared with Mr. Mora. She claimed that she had witnessed him act in a similar manner to the children. “They were scared and crying. My oldest child was biting her nails off.”
According to court documents, Mr. Mora kicked her so hard that her left leg was bruised. She had previously stated that she didn’t want to have sex, but he kicked her earlier that month.
The woman wrote in February 2020 that Mr. Mora threatened her with death if he found out she was cheating. She also said that Mr. Mora “is a very jealous person” who “has choked me in the past.”
The woman claimed that Mr. Mora had not threatened to harm her with a gun and was not in possession. It is not known how he acquired the weapon he used to attack her on Monday. The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment on Wednesday.
Although restraining orders are an important tool for domestic violence victims to ensure their safety, enforcement can sometimes be difficult. According to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Fielding School of Public Health, the University of California, Los Angeles found that 11% of women who had been murdered by their male partners had received restraining order. About one-third of those women were killed within a month after receiving restraining orders.
The Superior Court of California, Sacramento, granted the woman a five year restraining order on May 19, 2021. In it, the couple agreed to let Mr. Mora visit the couple’s children for “up to four hours per visit, supervised” by a man identified by church records and the coroner’s office as Nathaniel Kong. (Court records spell the man’s last name as “Alcon.”) A man who answered the phone listed for Mr. Kong’s wife said on Wednesday that she was not available to speak.
In seeking a restraining order, the woman said she was concerned about Mr. Mora’s “mental stability” and wanted his visits with the children to “be supervised by my friend.”
If Mr. Kong was not available, the couple agreed to have an agency supervise the visits at Mr. Mora’s expense, according to the restraining order.
These costs can be very expensive. Professional supervised-visitation monitors can range from $40 to $100 an hour, according to April Hayes, the executive director at the Sacramento Counseling and Family Service Center, which provides monitoring and counseling.
Dr. Hayes, who is a veteran in the field, said that Sacramento no longer has a federal grant for low-income parents to pay for some of the costs associated with these visits.
Parents who cannot afford professional monitors can often make arrangements with good-meaning, but not professionally trained, monitors. She explained that they can arrange meetings at churches or restaurants where security precautions might be harder to ensure.
Dr. Hayes claimed that she was attacked by a parent in 2012 while she was watching inside a church.
Referring to supervised meetings at her agency, Dr. Hayes said, “We have a lockdown process.” To ensure safety, people at the agency have at times used wands to check parents, she said. Dr. Hayes explained that these security measures are effective but parents don’t always appreciate them in a situation that can feel tense. “Parents being supervised feel victimized.”
“I really wish there was a better system,” she said, “but I don’t know what the answer is.”
Source: NY Times