After 2 women die in ‘ambush’ outside Hardin courthouse, what can Kentucky do better?

If you or someone you know has experienced domestic violence, call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. You can also contact any of Kentucky’s 15 domestic violence programs.

This story also discusses suicide. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988.

Georgia Hensley feels like she’s been “screaming in a padded room” for too long about gaps in the way Kentucky protects survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence.

Now that two women are dead in her town, “suddenly there’s two or three people at the tiny window on the door” listening to those concerns, said Hensley, the CEO of SpringHaven, which helps survivors of intimate partner violence in Kentucky’s Lincoln Trail District.

“It truly has been like begging for help and no one was listening … and that’s abhorrent,” Hensley said. “It should not take the death of a woman and her mother and the severe injury of her father for all of us to begin talking about the issues that we needed to be discussing anyway.”

A month after a woman and her mother were gunned down in the parking lot of the courthouse in Elizabethtown on the day of her emergency protective order (EPO) hearing, advocates who work to end intimate partner violence told the Lantern the state can and should do more to protect survivors.

That includes, they say, passing a Crisis Aversion and Rights Retention Orders (CARR) bill, which would establish a process for temporarily removing guns from people at risk of hurting themselves or others. In other words, a “red flag” law.

In 1994, Congress barred anyone who is subject to a domestic violence protective order — or who has been convicted of the crime of domestic violence — from possessing or buying a gun or ammunition. The United States Supreme Court upheld that law this year, saying it is constitutional to disarm a person in those circumstances.

Kentucky is not among the 32 states that have enacted their own laws and protocols to separate domestic abusers from guns, even temporarily. As a result, protection for victims varies across the state, said Darlene Thomas, the executive director of GreenHouse17, a Fayette County-based nonprofit working to end intimate partner violence.

The violent deaths in Elizabethtown, Hensley says, should spur action.

“The community is enraged,” she said. “Citizens are enraged. And our officials need to be listening.”

Georgia Hensley, CEO of SpingHaven, Inc., outside the Hardin County Justice Center in Elizabethtown. (Austin Anthony for the Kentucky Lantern)

What happened in Elizabethtown?

In early August, Erica Riley asked the court system to protect her from a man with whom, police say, she’d had a relationship.

A judge granted her request, issuing an emergency protective order (EPO) on Aug. 8 and scheduling a hearing to consider extending the order.

On the morning of the hearing, Aug. 19, Riley arrived at the Elizabethtown courthouse, family by her side.

The man in question, Christopher Elder, 46, was there too.

Jeremy Thompson, the Elizabethtown police chief, said that Elder shot Riley and two others in an “ambush type style” in the parking lot right before 9 a.m., when the hearing was scheduled.

Riley died there, police say, the day before she was to turn 38.

Her mother, Janet, later died at the hospital, police say. Erica Riley’s father was also injured and hospitalized, but has since been released, according to a police spokesman.

Within hours of the shooting, police publicly named Elder as their suspect. He led police on a multi-county, 100-mile car chase. After a standoff in a parking lot in Christian County with at least nine first responder agencies, he shot himself at 11:15 CST, according to Kentucky State Police.

Elder was airlifted to Vanderbilt Hospital and died that day.

Domestic violence, guns a lethal combination

The outside of the Hardin County Justice Center in Elizabethtown. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

While the Elizabethtown shooting got widespread attention, the key details aren’t uncommon.

The majority of murder-suicides (62%) in the United States have an intimate partner component, the nonprofit Violence Policy Center said in a 2023 report.

Almost all of those — 95% — were a man killing a woman and 93% of those involved a gun.

Most female homicide victims were killed by a current or former male partner, according to research published in the National Library of Medicine last year.

That same research showed victims of intimate partner violence are five times more likely to die if their abuser has access to a gun — and 1 in 8 convicted perpetrators of intimate partner violence admit they used a gun to threaten someone.

In 2022, about half of Kentucky women — 45.3% — and around 35.5% of men had experienced intimate partner violence — or threat of it — in their lifetimes, the Lantern has reported. In 2023, that number decreased to 44.5% of women and 32.9% of men.

When police respond to a domestic violence or adjacent situation, they are required to file a form called a JC-3. Of the roughly 41,000 Kentucky JC-3s filed in 2023, 97 involved a gun.

Hundreds more — 399 — involved terroristic threatening.

Research shows when abusive partners have access to guns, they’re more likely to kill. A 2023 paper published in the National Library of Medicine found victims were five times more likely to die when a firearm is involved.

Advocates who work to end intimate partner violence told the Lantern that Kentucky needs a way to remove weapons from the hands of domestic violence perpetrators.

Unfunded mandate

Downtown Elizabethtown (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Even though the Supreme Court says it’s constitutional to disarm people who are the subject of domestic violence protective orders, that’s basically an “unfunded mandate” in Kentucky, said Thomas with GreenHouse17.

“Our systems throughout the commonwealth are having to figure out who gets them, who collects them, who stores them, who marks them for storage,” she explained. “How do people get them back? When do they get them back? What’s the process for people to get their weapons back when they’ve been removed?”

There’s no funding in Kentucky to carry out the federal law, Thomas said, which results in an uneven application across the state.

“Some courts will sometimes ask the sheriffs to go confiscate the weapons. Sometimes they’ll tell a person, ‘you have to turn those weapons over to your attorney or to the sheriff’s department,’” she said. “All the systems are a little different by how they do it, but the federal law says they have authority to help see that weapons are not in the hands of abusers, right? How they go about doing that can look very different county to county, judge to judge, situation to situation.”

Based on existing laws, any firearm Elder had “should have been removed from his possession at the time he was served,” said Hensley, who is also an attorney.

It’s unclear if the gun used in the August shooting was registered to the suspect. No official information about the gun and how it was obtained is available, a police spokesman told the Lantern.

“The way that most sheriff’s departments serve those petitions and request for firearms is simply … they’ll knock on the door, (say), ‘Here you go, sir. Do you have any firearms in the house?’ And if the perpetrator says, ‘No,’ that’s it,” Hensley explained.

Whether or not a police officer has the legal ability to enter the home and search for those weapons is a complicated question, Hensley said. “I would probably argue, as an attorney: no,” she said.

One exception could be if the petitioner told authorities that the alleged perpetrator did have access to weapons.

Still, she said: “truthfully, that’s an uphill legal battle. They would really need to obtain a warrant or see something.”

Leaving is dangerous. It doesn’t need to happen alone.

Leaving an abusive situation — when it’s often most dangerous for survivors — is difficult, but doesn’t have to happen alone.

In Elizabethtown, Hensley organized a court escort volunteer service after Riley’s death.

“I don’t have any faith in the legislature or in our leadership to get that done, so I’ve done it,” she said. “And is that something that a nonprofit should be forced to do? Probably not. But is it something that we’re going to do? Yeah, it is. It is because safety is the most important thing.”

Still, survivors sometimes must enter a courthouse or go through a door at the same time as an abuser or sit together in a waiting area, advocates say.

Angela Yannelli

But there are simple — and inexpensive — solutions to those physical barriers, said Angela Yannelli, the CEO of ZeroV (formerly known as the Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence), such as bringing in the parties at different times and through different entrances and having a designated space for petitioners to wait separate from respondents.

It’s also currently up to a judge’s discretion if they hold domestic hearings over Zoom, Hensley said.

But it’s a policy she says the General Assembly should codify.

Doing so could lessen some of the physical stress of a hearing, she said. But, there are downsides.

“These cases can often be difficult to determine, and so much of it is based on body language and … a determination of who you believe,” she said. “And some of that is very difficult to do via Zoom.”

While there are safety gaps, the state has a lot working in its favor: a robust network of violence prevention programs and researched-backed primary prevention, which involves educating children and other community members about intimate partner violence, said Christy Burch, the CEO of the ION Center for violence prevention in Northern Kentucky.

“There’s barriers to staying. There’s barriers to leaving,” Burch said. “When I think about that preparation to leaving or making a big change there, reach out to your local program. We are here. You don’t have to walk that journey alone.”

Could a red flag law help?

Sen. Whitney Westerfield, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored CARR in 2024 but he’s leaving the Republican-controlled legislature after deciding not to run for reelection this year.

His co-sponsors for CARR were all Democrats. One of them, Louisville Sen. David Yates, is “working to build support from colleagues in the Senate to carry the bill with him” in 2025, a Senate Democrats spokesman said.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention reports that people dealing with suicidality are more likely to live if they lose access to guns and other “lethal means” temporarily, until intense feelings pass. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 988.

Aurora Vasquez is the vice president of state policy and engagement with Sandy Hook Promise.

Aurora Vasquez, the vice president of State Policy & Engagement with Sandy Hook Promise, a national nonprofit that works to end gun violence, said temporary removal is key to “defuse the situation.”

“It’s often painted as though CARR is producing a permanent loss of Second Amendment rights,” she said.

But the goal with CARR, she said, is to “give people help in the moment they need it most, so that they don’t lose their Second Amendment rights.”

“We can’t collectively as a society — and Kentucky certainly should not, given that it has a robust gun culture — should not look away from the fact that gun owners sometimes need help, and it’s okay,” Vasquez said. “As human beings, we all sometimes need help, right? Being a firearm owner does not exclude us from that.”

There’s no way to know if CARR could have saved Erica Riley’s life, Yannelli said.

“What we do know is that getting firearms out of the hands of an abuser will save lives,” she said.

Thomas with GreenHouse17 agreed.

“Weapons escalate situations and not deescalate them,” she said. “I think CARR protections … would help our law enforcement and our communities feel a little safer with temporary gun removal for somebody that’s experiencing an episode of some kind.”

A memorial where Erica Riley and her mother were shot in August in the parking lot of the Hardin County Justice Center. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

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