'Familicide' committed overwhelmingly by men: It's all about power and control

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy | The Journal News

If there’s one street in Pleasantville that begins and ends with a child-centric theme, it is Romer Avenue.

On that street sits a shingle-style colonial with an inviting front porch. It is the second closest house to the high school. Middle school is just steps away. The Mount Pleasant Public Library is at the entrance of the street.

When Chuan-Kai "Tom" and Dorothy Liu moved into their new home in October 2016 with their two young children, it’s easy to imagine that their children’s future was top of mind for the couple.

That ended in a horrific tragedy Thursday, just three years later, when the bodies of Tom Liu, 46, Dorothy Liu, 42, and their children Tennyson, 7, and Adeline, 4, were found in their home. Tom Liu, a financial services professional, who police said was under "considerable stress," stabbed his wife and children to death and then killed himself.

With his violent act, Liu joined the ranks of men who commit familicide, perpetrating the “most extreme form of domestic violence,” which occurs about 23 times per year in the United States, according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

Acts of familicide are typically premeditated and committed by adult men “motivated by uncontrolled anger, resentment, and revenge,” the report says.

Even more startling is the data from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which found that 94% of the victims of murder-suicides are female.

“It usually happens at a time when an abuser is losing control over the other person. It’s a time when they were going through a divorce, or the woman said she was leaving, that’s when there’s a high risk that things are going to turn lethal,” said Cindy Kanusher, executive director of the Pace Women’s Justice Center. “There's this sort of idea that, you know, this relationship is not going to exist anymore and I'm going to take everybody down with me.”

Authorities said that there was no history of domestic violence calls to the Liu's Pleasantville home. In a press conference on Friday, Pleasantville Police Chief Erik Grutzner said Tom Liu was under "considerable stress," but did not elaborate.

A pending divorce was the case in 2011 when Sam Friedlander of Cross River, a 50-year-old former assistant district attorney in Suffolk County, shot his children Molly, 10, and Gregory, 8, in their beds and bludgeoned his wife, Amy, with a rolling pin before shooting himself. The couple were going through a divorce while he was still living in the house.

Experts believe warning signs usually foreshadow such events.

“In the majority of cases where there is an intimate partner homicide or a familicide, there's been some form of domestic violence, physical abuse in the relationship prior to the homicide happening,” said Kanusher. “People who are living with domestic violence, we want them to know that there were resources out there to help.”

In May, in another high-profile case with ties to the area, Jennifer Dulos, a Connecticut mother of five, went missing. Police arrested her estranged husband and his girlfriend in connection with her disappearance.

Blood matching Jennifer Dulos was found on the garage floor of her home and on clothing dumped in multiple trash cans along a highway where cellphone records showed her husband Fotis Dulos had been, according to their arrest warrants.

Dulos, who filed for divorce in 2017, said in court papers that she feared for her life.

Jennifer Dulos is still missing and Fotis Dulos is out on bail.

Intimate-partner violence increased by 19 percent from 2014 to 2017 (after almost four decades of decline) according to James Alan Fox, a criminologist and professor of sociology at Northeastern University.

CarlLa Horton, executive director of Hope’s Door, said domestic violence centers often use a danger assessment tool involving a series of questions to determine the level of threat a women faces of being killed by her intimate partner.

Among the risk factors are partners who want to isolate women from friends and family, prior physical abuse, stalking, financial stress and access to guns, said Horton.

A 2013 study by a team of criminologists from Birmingham City University in the U.K. on 'family annihilators' believe the role of gender is these killings deserves a closer look.

"The family annihilator should be seen as a specific category of murderer, for a crime which appears to be increasing," said Professor David Wilson, one of the paper's three authors. "To begin solving this problem the role of gender must be recognized, acknowledging that it is mainly men who will resort to this type of violence."

For domestic violence experts, the statistics speak for themselves.

“These men who tend to kill need to have power and control and when they think they're losing it is when these murder-suicide can happen,” said Horton. “Domestic violence does not discriminate. Anyone can be a victim, regardless of educational level, race, ethnicity or socio-economic status.”

For help

Hope's Door Hotline: 1-888-438-8700

My Sister's Place: 1-800-298-7233

Pace Women's Justice Center: 914-287-0739

Center for Safety and Change: 845- 634-3344

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Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy covers women and power for the USA Today Network Northeast. Write to her at svenugop@lohud.com