A recent column on The Washington Post website offers valuable insight into a criminal act that many mass murderers have in common: Before their deadly rampage, they tried to strangle somebody.
The man who killed 26 people in a small-town Texas church had tried to strangle his wife when he attacked her. The 2016 Orlando nightclub gunman had tried to strangle both his wives. The column by Rachel Louise Snyder, a professor at American University, lists other killers who first tried to strangle somebody.
“The U.S. Sentencing Commission recognized strangulation as a marker of dangerousness in a 2014 report and recommended increased prison time — up to 10 years — for those convicted of it,” Snyder wrote. “Indeed, 45 states now recognize strangulation as a felony.”
That includes Mississippi, where an act of strangulation, or an attempt to strangle someone, is cause for domestic violence charges.
The director of the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention in California said in the Post column that a strangulation attempt in a domestic abuse situation increases the chance of homicide by seven times.
Snyder wrote, “It is a clear trajectory from escalating violence to homicide, of which strangulation is the penultimate act.” The California director added, “Statistically, we know that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide. They don’t go backwards.”
While this information is useful to authorities who are on the lookout for mass murderers, those incidents are far less common than cases of domestic violence, where there typically is only one victim. The message is clear: Men who try to strangle their partner are giving a warning about what their next action might be.
The Texas killer, for example, was not prosecuted on a felony charge of non-fatal strangulation. Had that occurred, he might have been sentenced to 10 years in prison instead of being a free and dangerous man, contemplating the attack of innocent people in church.
Police officers and prosecutors in Southwest Mississippi should learn more about links between strangulation and homicide. They should not hesitate to seek more aggressive criminal charges and penalties against those who try to choke someone to death.
“Strangulation, as a signal of dangerousness, is not only overlooked by most law enforcement officers and prosecutors, it’s not always recognized by health-care workers,” Snyder wrote. “Symptoms can appear days or months afterward. Victims are regularly released from emergency rooms without undergoing CT scans or MRIs.
“Most strangulation injuries are not visible enough to photograph, and police often don’t know to look for other signs — including urination, slurred speech, redness around the eyes or scalp, a hoarse voice or trouble swallowing. As a result, injuries are played down in police reports and commonly noted as mere scratches or redness around the neck, according to a study ... of 300 non-fatal strangulation cases.”
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal