DOUBLE DANGER, by Earl Smith & Angela J. Hattery
A judge had ordered Justin Fairfax, the former lieutenant governor of Virginia, to move out of the house where on April 16 he killed his wife and then himself. On April 19, in Shreveport, La., Shamar Elkins shot his wife, a second woman, and eight children the day before he was due in divorce court. These are not anomalies. They are data points in a crisis that has persisted for generations.
The two cases have catalyzed a necessary national conversation about the fact that a woman’s risk of being killed by an intimate partner is highest in the weeks and months around a separation. But that conversation must not flatten the racial dimensions of this crisis. All three adult victims were Black women. Both men were Black. And while domestic violence crosses every racial and economic line, the data are unambiguous: Black women bear a disproportionate share of its consequences.
According to a 2025 study by the Violence Policy Center, Black women are killed by men at twice the rate of their white counterparts. Domesticviolence homicide is a leading cause of homicide of women, accounting for 30% to 40% of femicides; the majority were killed with firearms. A separate Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis found that more than 4 in 10 Black women experience physical violence from an intimate partner during their lifetimes—a rate exceeding that for any other demographic.
The problem is not simply a shortage of shelters or hotlines, though those are real. The deeper barrier is trust. For Black women, a justified historical skepticism toward police and child-protective services—institutions with long records of overpolicing Black families and underprotecting Black victims—creates a painful calculus. Seeking help can mean inviting the state into one’s home in ways that may bring new harms, including the removal of children or criminalization of a partner whose behavior has not yet risen to the level of a chargeable offense. We argue that this is not paranoia, but rather a rational response to documented institutional patterns.
At the same time, access to culturally competent mental-health care for Black men experiencing crisis—the other side of this equation—remains severely limited. Programs like the YBMen Project, which creates peer-supported spaces for young Black men to address mental health openly, represent a promising model. But they are chronically underfunded relative to the scale of need. Elkins, the Shreveport man, sought help at a Louisiana VA hospital. Former lieutenant governor Fairfax’s mental-health deterioration was documented in court records, where a judge called “very concerning” his reluctance to seek care. In neither case did the systems intercept the trajectory toward violence.
The Response to these tragedies cannot be limited to candlelight vigils and expressions of heartbreak from elected officials, however sincere. Public policy must address the structural conditions behind the crisis.
First, family courts must develop robust lethality-assessment protocols triggered by the conditions most associated with intimate-partner homicide: recent or pending separation, history of coercive control, access to firearms, and deteriorating mental health in the respondent. These assessments exist, but they are not universally required or resourced.”
Second, federal and state funding for domestic-violence services must be directed with equity in mind. Community-based organizations serving Black survivors are routinely underfunded relative to their caseloads. The federal Violence Against Women Act provides an important foundation, but its implementation must be evaluated for equity in resource distribution.
Third, the mental-health dimension of domestic violence cannot be treated as separate from prevention. Expanded access to affordable, culturally competent mental-health services—particularly for Black men in economic and legal crisis—is not a peripheral concern. It is central. This means funding community mental-health infrastructure, not just crisis hotlines, and ensuring VA services reach veterans before, not after, a household is in acute danger. And finally, mandatory holding periods for firearm purchases during active divorce and domestic proceedings, combined with better enforcement of existing laws prohibiting individuals subject to domestic-violence protective orders from possessing firearms, represent common-sense interventions with documented effectiveness. Both Elkins and Fairfax had legal histories and behavioral red flags. Neither should have had a gun.
We failed these families. And we cannot afford to fail anyone else.
Entire article courtesy of Earl Smith & Angela J. Hattery
Smith is a senior research fellow at, and Hattery co-founder of, the University of Delaware’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender-Based Violence”
Royalty-free photo courtesy of Google’s Gemini
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