Eighteen months before she was killed with a machete in a Scarborough laneway, Tharshika Jeganathan sat in the witness box of an east-end courthouse, detailing the alleged abuse at the hands of her new husband.

The couple had recently wedded in India in an arranged marriage, and Jeganathan had since joined Sasikaran Thanapalasingam and his family in Toronto. She’d left behind relatives, friends and a government job in Sri Lanka.

Within days of her arrival on Feb. 23, 2017, Jeganathan began feeling uneasy about her husband. She found a box of condoms and pornography and believed he’d been unfaithful, she said. Thanapalasingam refused to get her a SIM card to talk to relatives on a cellphone, telling her “in this country, only the husband uses the phone,” she testified. She began sleeping on the sofa.

When she raised her concerns with him, they argued. In early March 2017, she was with Thanapalasingam in a car when she alleged he grabbed her left arm and painfully twisted it.

She alleged that six days later, he suddenly shoved her head into a pillow while the two were in their living room. She told the court that she’d struggled to break free for between two and three minutes before she bit Thanapalasingam’s hand, and he let her go.

“It became very painful. I started screaming and crying,” Jeganathan said through a Tamil interpreter in the February 2018 trial, where Thanapalasingam was charged with two counts of assault.

“It was terrible. I found it so difficult,” she said, her voice high and soft.

While he was holding her head down, she alleged he’d asked her: “Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am capable of?”

After a swift trial, a Scarborough judge acquitted Thanapalasingam, now 38, of assaulting Jeganathan, by then his estranged wife, saying inconsistencies in her evidence had raised reasonable doubt about whether the violence happened.

A year and a half later, Thanapalasingam is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Jeganathan, 27, after a machete attack in a laneway close to her home on Fishery Rd., near Ellesmere and Meadowvale roads. Her screams had pierced the quiet residential neighbourhood at dinnertime, prompting neighbours to call 911.

She died on the street.

At the time of Jeganathan’s death a peace bond was still in effect: Thanapalasingam had agreed not to go within 500 metres of Jeganathan’s home, school, workplace or anywhere else she might reasonably be. He’d previously failed to comply with a bail condition related to the assault charges, but was given a conditional discharge with probation.

Thanapalasingam appeared in a Scarborough court earlier this week. His lawyer, Mitch Engel, declined to comment Friday.

ISEE Initiative, a Toronto-based domestic violence non-profit group, is now spearheading an effort to return Jeganathan’s body to her family in Sri Lanka. According to the organization, Jeganathan had been making it on her own in Canada. She’d found a new place to live, was taking English classes and was earning a living working at Dollarama and sending money back home.

“Tharshika was a strong, dedicated woman that did everything she could to escape,” ISEE Initiative wrote in a GoFundMe post raising funds for the grieving family.

The red flags signalling that a woman is in danger are well established, chief among them a history of violence in the relationship and an actual or pending separation.

In Ontario, the same risk factors are repeatedly documented by the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee. Established in 2003, the committee of domestic violence experts, social workers and police reviews deaths stemming from domestic violence.

Of the 311 cases reviewed by the committee between 2003 and 2017 (resulting in 445 deaths), 72 per cent involved a history of domestic violence in the relationship. In 67 per cent, there was an actual or pending separation.

As shown by the work of the committee, the vast majority of domestic homicides are predictable and preventable, “and yet, they continue to happen at a very high rate,” said Pamela Cross, a lawyer and advocate with three decades’ experience working to end violence against women.

“I feel obviously a great deal of sorrow every time a woman is killed by her partner, or former partner. I also feel a huge amount of anger that we haven’t been able to address this properly yet,” Cross said.

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The trial for Thanapalasingam’s two assault charges was brief, taking only one day and hearing from two witnesses: Jeganathan and Thanapalasingam’s mother.

On the stand, Jeganathan said she’d moved out after the alleged assault but still wanted to give her husband a chance. But she soon realized that she didn’t want to be with him.

“He continued to harass me by following me where I went, following me to my classes, trying to prevent me from studying — all of this made me realize that I could not live with him,” she said through an interpreter.

Thanapalasingam’s mother, who was at home at the time of the second alleged assault, testified that it never happened. According to a summary of the mother-in-law’s testimony by Judge Kimberley Crosbie, Thanapalasingam’s mother said it was Jeganathan who was angry, and that during a fight over immigration papers Jeganathan had bitten her son’s hand.

In her decision, Crosbie said she did not believe the mother-in-law’s evidence, saying she was evasive and “danced around direct questions.” She offered “gratuitous criticisms” of Jeganathan that “left me with the impression that even if her son had done what was alleged, she would have thought it was justified and would have defended him in court,” Crosbie said.

“Part of this impression came from her evidence that because her son was the complainant’s husband, she thought he could touch her even against her own wishes,” Crosbie said.

But she explained that to convict Thanapalasingam, the standard of proof was high, and it hadn’t been met in the case. There had been “gaps” and inconsistencies with Jeganathan’s evidence, including that she gave different explanations when answering questions posed by the Crown and defence lawyers.

Crosbie noted she did not conclude that Jeganathan lied, but said she’d been left with a reasonable doubt about what happened, and acquitted Thanapalasingam. Noting Jeganathan’s evidence that Thanapalasingam had been following her to school, she suggested a common law peace bond in an effort to keep Thanapalasingam away from her.

Cross said one step toward ending violence against women would be for government agencies to act on the recommendations that result from the work of Ontario’s death review committee, which are often repeated.

Nadine Wathen, an expert on violence against women and a professor at Western University, said more attention must be paid not only to cases like Jeganathan’s — a death that captured public attention in part because of the weapon used — but to all cases of domestic violence.

“Every day, women are undergoing coercive control, abusive behaviours, and we have to remember the less spectacular, to put it crassly, the mundane, daily terror that women are living in,” Wathen said.

Jeganathan will be remembered for her “beautiful soul, full of energy and passion,” ISEE Initiative wrote.

“Tharshika’s smile filled the room and she was loved by her family and friends.”