Before 2014, catch up on the best of The New Republic. For the next few weeks, we'll be re-posting a selection of our most thought-provoking pieces from the recent past.

Jo’Anna Bird arrived at her family’s two-story, wood-frame house at about 11 p.m. on a winter night three years ago. The house sits on a quiet street in one of the poorer corners of one of America’s richest counties: New Cassel, in Nassau, on Western Long Island. Bird, 24, was a mother of two who often wore her long brown hair in a ponytail. She had worked as a school bus monitor, a medical assistant, a Walmart cashier, a supervisor at BJ’s Wholesale Club, and she now hoped to be a corrections officer. She had come to stay with her mother and stepfather because the possessiveness of her ex-boyfriend—the father of her young son—had evolved into something much more frightening, and she did not want to be alone.

Leonardo Valdez-Cruz, known to most as “Pito,” waited for Bird that night behind a row of hedges in the front yard. After she parked, he appeared and said he wanted to talk. Bird refused, went into the house, and locked the front door. “We assumed he left. We all went to bed,” says Sharon Dorsett, Bird’s mother. “The next thing we heard was her screaming.” Valdez-Cruz had broken in through the basement and tried to smother Bird, who was lying on a couch in the living room watching television, Dorsett told me. When he dashed to the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife, Bird ran to her nephew’s room. Bird’s stepfather told Valdez-Cruz to leave, which he did. A short time later, Valdez-Cruz tried climbing in through a bedroom window, but Bird’s nephew threatened to stab the intruder with a fork. Next, Valdez-Cruz tried squeezing in the bathroom window, but he couldn’t fit, although his baseball cap toppled into the tub. Bird’s stepfather called the police.

The two officers arrived sometime after midnight. As the family crowded into the living room to explain what had happened, Valdez-Cruz returned to the house and casually knocked on the front door. One of the officers let him in. Bird had two protection orders against Valdez-Cruz, but the police did not arrest him. “They said, ‘Pito, get out of here, go take a walk somewhere,’” Dorsett says. It was a response that was by now familiar to Bird. “He’s going to kill me,” Dorsett recalls her daughter saying. “I’m going to die.”

A couple of months later, on the afternoon of March 19, 2009, Jo’Anna Bird’s body was in the back of a Nassau County Police ambulance. Her outstretched hand dangled off the side of a stretcher; her blood-streaked face tilted to the left. A gland ballooned from her neck, which had been sliced from ear to ear. As the investigator filming the area moved from the ambulance into Bird’s spartan two-bedroom apartment, the evidence of a brutal struggle and its aftermath was everywhere: a clump of hair in the front yard; pools of blood in the stairwell; a knocked-out screen in the window. Bird had been tortured and left bleeding to death inside her apartment. According to the autopsy, she had suffered blunt force trauma to the torso and head, and her trachea, esophagus, and jugular had been perforated.

By the following year, Valdez-Cruz had been convicted of Bird’s murder and given a life sentence. Dorsett believed her daughter’s death had been preventable, so she sued Nassau County in federal court. Her case cast the police department and other government officials as completely ineffective. Even as Bird lay dying, Dorsett’s lawsuit claimed, police officers who had been called to her apartment did nothing; one dismissed the call as “the Pito thing again.” Eventually, Nassau County settled with Dorsett for $7.7 million. The police commissioner said that seven officers were found to have improperly handled Bird’s calls. But, earlier this year, after reading a secret internal affairs report detailing Bird’s death, a member of the legislature told a local TV station that 22 officers “ought to be ashamed to look at themselves in the mirror every morning when they get up to shave—much less be wearing the badge.”