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Cop Life

Another tale of the police, doing what they do best, this time from Florida:

Mom: Police Told Daughter To Stop Calling Before Murder-Suicide 'The Day She Died, She Knew She Couldn't Talk To Police,' Mom Says

POSTED: 7:38 am EST February 18, 2008
UPDATED: 3:04 pm EST February 18, 2008

DELAND, Fla. -- A Central Florida woman whose 17-year-old daughter was killed in a murder-suicide apparently committed by her ex-boyfriend said the teen was told by police to stop calling for help or she'd be arrested.

Police said Clay Coffner shot his estranged girlfriend, Natasha Hall, in the head outside her DeLand home Friday before turning the gun on himself.

The whole story, what there is of it, lives here.
We worked for a couple of months as a Municipal Court public defender in one of our western counties (western Kansas begins about halfway across Wanamaker Road, in case you're wondering), in a town where the local police chief had decided that the way to curb domestic violence was to just arrest everybody at the scene and charge them with battery, domestic violence, riot, whatever the City Attorney thought she could sell to the judge. We're not sure how well it curbed domestic violence, but the results were nothing compared with this case. The DeLand Police Department seems to have figured out how to curb domestic violence calls, along with the actual incidence of domestic violence. Moreover, they've managed to do it while avoiding a pesky increase in the number of open homicide cases.
As Josef Stalin once observed, "Death solves all problems - no man, no problem."

Full post as published by West Neanderthal Drive on February 18, 2008 (boomark / email).