SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A 10-year-old boy was shot and killed by his father, who then turned the gun on himself at the Kings County, California, home of the boy's grandparents.
A 9-year-old New Hampshire boy was shot and killed by his father, who then committed suicide.
A Washington man lit his two sons on fire and then killed himself in a house fire.
And then on Monday night, a 39-year-old father at a Sacramento church killed his three girls, their chaperone, then himself with an assault rifle.
The killings, all in the last 10 years, had one thing in common. All were supervised visitation arrangements in which children were supposed to be monitored by someone to prevent violence.
Even in the best of circumstances, such supervised visits are fraught with risks and fear for the victims of intimate partner violence, say family law experts who spoke with The Sacramento Bee, risks that violently played out at The Church in Sacramento late Monday afternoon.
For Julia Weber of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, each of the incidents point to systemic failings in the way too many jurisdictions across the U.S. handle supervised visitations.
All too often, Weber said, supervised visitations don't happen in secure settings, where there are checks and security in place to ensure that no weapons are present.
"Because firearms are so readily accessible," she said, "we have to be imagining that firearms could be brought into the situation at any time."
How supervised visits are conducted varies by county and depends on where the parties are in the restraining order or custody process, said Kelly Alison Behre, director of the Family Protection and Legal Assistance Clinic at UC Davis School of Law. Parties can generally ask a family member, friend or other non-professional acquaintance to monitor the visit, seek out a certified professional or schedule visits at a supervised site.
The Church in Sacramento, where Monday's shooting occurred, wasn't listed by Sacramento Superior Court as one of the more than two dozen facilities, including counseling centers and other businesses, that provide "supervised visitation services" in family court cases. Court officials cautioned that the list didn't equal an endorsement, but was a self-reported resource.
Judges also can order the visits following a hearing. Court orders sometimes specify who will supervise the visits or leave it up to the parties to find and agree upon a supervisor.
The guidelines were spelled out in the May 2021 Sacramento Superior Court restraining order against the church shooter, David Mora.
Four-hour supervised weekend visits with his three daughters, shorter if the friend appointed to supervise the visits was not available for the full time.
In that case, a mutually agreed upon person from the family's church would supervise.
Mora also was told to complete at least 16 sessions of anger management group sessions before he could petition for unsupervised visits.
No firearms.
Visits were mandated by the judge in the case, Sacramento Superior Court Commissioner Kimberly Parker. The mother had to comply with the order, said Sacramento Superior Court officials.
The weeks and months after separating from an abusive intimate partner are the most dangerous — and deadly — times for victims, said Behre of UC Davis' King Hall. The restraining order filed against Mora last May gave a chilling glimpse into why survivors fear these arrangements.
Mora was unstable, the children's mother said, according to the restraining order. She asked that a friend be present to offer a measure of security.
"Due to Respondent's mental instability, I am asking that visitation with the children be supervised by my friend," the children's mother requested.
That wasn't enough to stop him from shooting his children and their chaperone.
Nathaniel Kong, the church elder and family friend asked to supervise the visit, was 59.
"If you're the mom, you think, 'OK, the church would be a safe place. It's...the church we went to. Everybody knows us, and I feel safe there.' But sometimes, when it comes to supervised visitations, they can give a false sense of security," said Joyce Bilyeu, deputy director of the Sacramento Regional Family Justice Center, who has spent more than 40 years helping victims of domestic violence.
Behre of UC Davis was blunt about the potential for an abuser to torment a loved one through a supervised visit: "Court-ordered visitation with an abusive party provides the abusive party with a tool to further harm his victim through their children."
Batterers have a driving need to regain and reassert control, said Matt Huckabay, executive director at The Center for Violence-Free Relationships in Placerville. Killing occurs as a byproduct of their campaign to get their former partner to surrender their power.
"When they reach a point where they have lost the ability to have the other person acquiesce to their demands, they have to keep upping the ante," Huckabay said. "They do more and more and more aggressive and violent things. It's a natural part of the cycle that eventually you run out of aggressive and violent things to do short of death."
It's why Weber of the Giffords Law Center advocates for giving the victims of domestic abuse the option of having a secure, government-funded location for parental visitations.
"I would like them to take place in a professional setting funded by the government," Weber said. "That includes appropriate security measures: Metal detectors, secure parking lots, and different drop off and arrival times — all to ensure that firearms can't be brought into the supervised visitation setting."
But in California, no state funding is available to provide secure locations for supervised visits, she said.
Instead, the entire state receives $655,000 to $670,000 from the federal government to dole out to courts and county governments to "support and facilitate ... supervised visitation and exchange services, parent education, and group counseling services for family law cases," according to a report last year by the Judicial Council of California.
"The federal funding for this program is extremely limited, and the need for access to visitation services is high," the council said. "Existing funding levels cannot meet the current demand for services."
More than half of shootings nationally in which more than three people were killed in one event were related to domestic or family violence, according to a 2020 report in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
Researchers in another study found that, in nearly 70% of mass shootings, the perpetrator either killed at least one partner or family member or had a history of domestic violence.
Experts say that firearms in the home make it five times more likely for a domestic violence situation to end in a murder. At the same time, the experts say state government doesn't provide nearly enough resources to send officers to remove guns from domestic abuse suspects who are barred from owning them.
"We know that children and adults who have been victimized by domestic violence are at greatest risk at the time of separation from an abusive person, and this risk can continue for years, meaning we need to pay maximum attention to safety concerns at the time of seeking emergency orders and in the years that follow," said Jane Stoever, a University of California, Irvine law professor and director of the university's Initiative to End Family Violence.
Those concerns became all too real for the family of 10-year-old Wyland Gomes. The boy was murdered by his father during a supervised morning visit at the Hanford home of the boy's grandparents. Victor Gomes, 43, then turned the gun on himself.
The two-year anniversary of the murder was Wednesday.
The boy's aunt, Alysia Gonzalez, said her sister might have requested her son meet with his father at a secure location, had that option been available after she received a restraining order against him and if she'd known he had a gun. The restraining order had expired at the time of the shooting, Gonzalez said.
Gomes had at one point threatened to kill the boy and had once threatened suicide, but he had surrendered a weapon to police and was supposedly unable to buy another gun. Her sister assumed the supervised visits with the boy's grandparents would be safe, Gonzalez said.
"We didn't know that he had purchased another gun," Gonzalez told The Bee.
Today, memories of Wyland find a home on a Facebook page run by his mother: Wyland trying an oversize paper mustache on for size; exploring the outdoors; broadly smiling in a dress shirt and tie for a family photo.
Wyland's mother, Christy Camara, last August described the horror of that day in a Facebook post.
"My entire world came crashing down," she wrote. "Instead of picking up my half-asleep 10-year-old son to be with his fifth-grade class, I turned the corner to find the road blocked, police officers and yellow caution tape."
She wrote that Gomes had told his friends, "Christy keeps thinking that I would hurt her. I would never hurt her. I would hurt myself and take (Wyland) with me and let her suffer the rest of her life."
"How could he take my baby away from me? Why did he take a gun and shoot my son? What kind of person does that?"
The shooting at The Church in Sacramento, so close to the two-year anniversary of Wyland's murder, brought back horrible memories about the day the boy's father killed the "very funny, very witty" little boy who loved basketball and playing video games, his aunt, Gonzalez, told The Bee.
"When things like this happen," Gonzalez said, "it definitely hits our home."
