"McMurray and Blackmore, interviewing non-custodial fathers, comment that the 'most alarming issue related to the men's coping strategies concerned their attitude towards violence against women... 34 per cent spoke sympathetically of custody-related murder-suicides.'" -- Influences on Parent-Child Relationships in Non-Custodial Fathers" (1993)14 Australian Journal of Marriage and Family 151 at p 154.

Trag·e·dy (trj-d) n. pl. trag·e·dies - 1. A drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances. 2. The genre made up of such works. 3. The art or theory of writing or producing these works. 4. A play, film, television program, or other narrative work that portrays or depicts calamitous events and has an unhappy but meaningful ending. 5. A disastrous event, especially one involving distressing loss or injury to life: an expedition that ended in tragedy, with all hands lost at sea. 6. A tragic aspect or element.

Reporters must stop using the illiterate word "tragedy" to describe domestic homicide, infanticide, and familicide.  Murders are not "tragedies." They are often preventable and certainly not inevitable. "Tragedy" refers to the outcome from the point of view of the protagonist or actor, his suffering of an accidental, unpredictable, inexplicable, unavoidable, and unintentional outcome. Crimes do not fit this description!!! Stop writing about them as the misfortune of perpetrators! They are not "tragedies." They are OUTRAGES.

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BALTIMORE, March 31, 2008 - Three young children from Montgomery County were found slain in a hotel room in Baltimore yesterday, shortly after their father called the front desk to report that he had killed them... In 2006, according to court records, Amy Castillo was granted temporary sole custody on an emergency motion, but Mark Castillo was granted visitation rights shortly afterward. At least twice last year, motions that would have withheld visitation rights were denied. At one point, according to the records, Amy Castillo was fined for refusing visitation rights... LINK

IOWA CITY, Iowa March 27, 2008 - ...Autopsy results released by the State Medical Examiner's Office confirm the entire Sueppel family died from blunt force trauma to the head. Police say Steven Sueppel might have used a baseball bat to murder his wife and four children. Then, he killed himself by driving into a post on the interstate..... LINK

BAYOU LA BATRE, Ala. (AP) January 9, 2008 - A man angered after a dispute with his wife confessed to tossing his four young children off a bridge, authorities said Wednesday as they searched murky waters for the bodies.... LINK

SAN ANTONIO December 13, 2007 - A man fatally shot his two daughters in the head then killed himself in a dispute with the children's mother, authorities said.... LINK

LAYTONSVILLE, Maryland (AP) November 23, 2007 - A man shot and killed his ex-wife, their three children and himself in a small-town park as the woman prepared to hand over custody, police said Friday... LINK

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) November 21, 2007 - The father of two children whose remains were found in a shallow grave more than three years after they disappeared confessed publicly and was charged Tuesday in their shootings. Dan Porter, 44, is already serving a 38-year prison term for kidnapping his son, Sam, 7, and daughter, Lindsey, 8, in order to terrorize their mother. He was charged Tuesday with two counts of first-degree murder...

November 16, 2007 - When Colette Lynch was viciously attacked by her boyfriend, the attending police did not even log the incident as a crime. Two days later, he killed her. The officers were found to be at fault - and fined just five days' pay..... LINK

Murder Suspect Recently Won Control Of Daughter Released From Halfway House, He Was Granted Sole Custody Of 5-Year-Old - By MATTHEW KAUFFMAN | And LISA CHEDEKEL Courant Staff Writers July 27, 2007 - Just six weeks before he was arrested and charged with killing three members of a Cheshire family, Joshua Komisarjevsky was in his own family battle, fighting in court to win custody of his 5-year-old daughter. Fresh from a halfway house where he served out a prison term for multiple burglaries, Komisarjevsky asked a family court judge for sole custody of Jayda Norton, saying the girl's mother was being held at a hospital for evaluation and drug treatment. His petition was granted.

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (AP) July 16, 2007 -- A man fatally shot his three children and took his own life as law officers searched for him on a domestic violence claim made by his estranged wife, police said. Eric Robinson, 42, was found dead Sunday night in the house where his wife lived with their children... LINK

EX-DEPUTY WHO RAPED HIS DAUGHTER AND POSTED THE VIDEO ONLINE CAUGHT IN HONG KONG - May 2, 2007. The U.S. Marshals Service said a law enforcement team had hunted down Kenneth John Freeman -- the man the director of the Marshals Service called the "king of the child exploitation suspects," tracking him to Hong Kong where he was arrested Monday...

Family Court Judge arrested for domestic abuse June 22, 2006 02:05 PM EDT: Family Court Judge arrested for domestic abuse He makes a living off of hearing cases involving spousal abuse. Now a family court judge is finding himself on the other side of the law. Judge Steven Jones was arrested Tuesday night for domestic violence... Judge Jones has been on the bench in Clark County since 1993.

10 Murder-Suicides a Week in America: ...the Violence Policy Center has conducted two major studies. The latest, American Roulette: Murder-Suicide in the United States, used a national clipping service supplemented by Internet searches to collect murder-suicide incidents nationwide from January 1, 2005, through June 30, 2005. During this period, 591 Americans died in 264 murder-suicide incidents, 92 percent of these incidents involved a gun. Nearly all the murderers were male. Nearly three quarters of the murder-suicides involved an intimate partner (spouse, ex-spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend), and of these, 96 percent were females killed by their intimate partners. Three quarters of all murder-suicides occurred in the home... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-sugarmann/price-of-freedom-contin_b_20302.html

Man throws children from South Beach balcony to their deaths, then kills self, by Jennifer Kay, AP, May 27 2006, 1:17 PM EDT MIAMI BEACH, Fla. -- A man killed his two young children by throwing them off the 15th floor of a landmark South Beach hotel and then jumped to his own death Saturday, police said. The children were 4- and 8-years-old and the family was vacationing from Alton, Ill., said Bobby Hernandez, Miami Beach police spokesman... The woman told police that the couple had been having marital problems for the past six months, Hernandez said. Hernandez said the family had been celebrating the couple's 10th wedding anniversary. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-0527suicide,0,4521233.story?coll=sfla-home-headlines

Police: Sex assault suspect shoots family, self Man kills wife, two children, then himself before testifying in trial Updated: 3:18 p.m. ET May 25, 2006 MILLVILLE, N.J. -- A man standing trial on sexual assault charges apparently killed his wife, their two children and himself hours before he was to testify Thursday, authorities said. The bodies of Scott McCarter, 40, his wife, Wendy, 35, their 12-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter were discovered by a friend who went to check on McCarter when he didnt appear in court Thursday morning. They were shot with a long-barreled rifle or shotgun... McCarter was accused of molesting two teenage girls between 2001 and 2004. He had denied the charges, telling investigators in a tape-recorded interview played in court Wednesday that he offered the girls advice on hygiene and sexual matters and that any physical contact he had with them was accidental. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12974864/

Rapist Who Left Daughter For Dead Sentenced by Charles Montaldo, January 11, 2006 -- Rapist Who Left Daughter For Dead Sentenced. John Rollins Tuggle, the convicted sex offender who raped and stabbed his 12-year-old daughter and left her for dead at a remote campsite in Idaho, has been sentenced to two life in prison terms without possibility of parole. At his sentencing hearing, the victim of the crime, Tuggle's daughter, made a statement to the court. "You left me to die and for that you do not deserve life," she said. "I will remove your actions from my mind, as I've already removed you from my heart." http://crime.about.com/b/a/234591.htm

LOCUST GROVE, Ga., January 2, 2006 (AP) -- A man and his three children were found dead after a standoff in an apparent murder-suicide, police said.   A woman called police from a neighbor's house Sunday and said her husband had beaten her with a gun and that he was in their house with their three children, a 4-year-old girl and boys ages 8 and 12.   She also said he had threatened to kill himself and his family, authorities said. When police arrived, the man went back into the house and barricaded himself in, Henry County Police Sgt. Palmerin Thomas said.   Police spent about four hours trying to get the man to surrender but were not successful. SWAT members were called to the scene and used a robot to knock down the door and go inside

By ANDREW RYAN AND KATE MORAN Published on 1/1/2004 New London -- In May 1998, when Alquan White was 6 weeks old, the state Department of Children and Families learned that the child might be a victim of parental neglect. An emergency room employee at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital called the DCF hotline when Allen James brought his infant son to the emergency room with mild pneumonia. The employee was concerned about the boy and the care he would get when discharged from the hospital, the agency said in a statement released late Wednesday. [The child's father] has confessed to murdering Alquan, who would now be almost 6 years old, several years ago. Waterford police arrested James when they found the boy's dismembered body stuffed into a suitcase after a traffic stop Sunday. Until Wednesday, the agency had said that its first knowledge of the boy was in 2001, through the father's lawyer, who said Alquan was healthy at the time.

DALLAS, April 25, 2002 (AP) - An accountant was found guilty of capital murder Wednesday for shooting to death his two young daughters while their anguished mother listened on the telephone. Jurors deliberated 19 minutes before convicting John Battaglia, 46, in the May deaths of 9-year-old Faith and 6-year-old Liberty. As the jurors turned to the punishment phase in the afternoon, they heard a chilling account of abuse from Michelle Ghetti, who said she was stalked, threatened and brutally beaten by Battaglia while they were married... The abusive behavior started when she was pregnant with their daughter, Christie, Ghetti testified, and escalated after they separated in September of 1986. Once barred from the house, Battaglia would hide in bushes outside and jump in the garage when Ghetti came home, she said. Battaglia moved into a house a few blocks from Ghetti's, taped her phone conversations, and would follow her in his vehicle when she drove, she said...One night, she said she woke up to see him standing over, wanting sex. Ghetti said Battaglia threatened to kill himself if she didn't take him back... In closing arguments, prosecutors called the crime an act of vengeance against Pearle. "The one way that John Battaglia could punish Mary Jean for the rest of her life was to take the two things that were most important to her and execute them all the while she was listening," prosecutor Keith Robinson said. "This man, who those little girls looked to for love and protection and trust, took those weapons, put them to the back of each one of their heads as they are lying there crippled from those gunshot wounds to the spine, and he pulled the trigger," Robinson said. "The two girls he supposedly loved." Battaglia, who had been rubbing his eyes and crying, interrupted at that point, saying, "I did love them."...Pearle has testified that when she returned Battaglia's call the night of the shootings, he had Faith ask on speaker phone, "Mommy, why do you want Daddy to have to go to jail?" Then she said she heard her daughter say, "No Daddy, please, no don't do it," followed by shooting.

CAMBRIDGE, Md., September 10, 1999 (AP) -- A 3-year-old girl died Friday, a day after police accused her father of shooting her and her brother and trying to cover it up with a story about a carjacking. Police said Richard Spicknall II, 27, confessed to shooting his 2-year-old son, Richard Spicknall III, who died Thursday, and his daughter, Destiny Array Spicknall, who was severely wounded and died Friday. ...Spicknall called police early Thursday to report that an armed hitchhiker he picked up on a bridge had thrown him into the Choptank River and driven off with his children. Police found him dripping wet at a pay phone three hours after the purported carjacking. Construction workers found the children in the Jeep Wrangler a half-mile away on Thursday morning. Spicknall had told their mother, his estranged wife, that he was taking their children for a vacation in Ocean City, Md. Instead, authorities say, he shot them both at close range while they were buckled in their car seats. ...``Outside of the allegations, the defendant is basically an All-American young man,'' said defense attorney Michael Belsky. ``He's basically been a hard-working, family-loving young man his entire life.'' ...

APACHE JUNCTION, Ariz., September 4, 1999 (AP) -- A Phoenix man doused his sleeping daughter with gasoline, then burned her to death after taking the toddler on a drive to look at Christmas lights, authorities said. Kristen Salem was found dead near a desert road early Friday. Authorities said the 2-year-old appeared to have crawled 10 feet from where she was set on fire. Maricopa County Sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Dave Trombi said Friday that the girl's father, Shawn Grell, 24, had admitted killing her and turned himself in.

KAUFMAN, Texas, Aug. 28, 1999 (UPI) -- A man who beat his daughter to death because she soiled herself and a rug is in jail in a rural area east of Dallas... Williams said the girl's 24-year-old father admitted beating her when he became enraged because of the accident, but Harris said the medical examiner found evidence of ``long-term physical abuse.'' A physical evidence team from the Dallas County Sheriff's Department has joined the investigation, and Williams has asked the Dallas County medical examiner's office to conduct an autopsy.

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