A mother whose three children were shot dead this week at a Sacramento County church during a supervised visit to their father received a restraining order against him last year after she told court officials he was abusive and threatened to kill her.
The father, David Mora, 39, shot and killed his three daughters — aged 9, 10 and 13 — and a church minister who agreed to supervise visits before shooting himself, according to law enforcement, the coroner’s office and the court. records.
Monday’s shooting comes after Mr Mora’s 15-year-old partner described his history of abuse in court documents filed in late April 2021. The New York Times does not release the woman’s name. On Wednesday, her phone call was not answered.
The order, issued in May 2021, lays out conditions to allow Mr Mora to visit his children and prohibits the purchase or possession of firearms.
Mr Mora “said he didn’t kill me because he didn’t know where to go with the kids,” the woman said in court documents. She added: “I am scared and nervous. I’m afraid the defendant will hurt me.”
The woman also stated that Mr. Mora physically abused her in the presence of their three children.
She said the latest violence happened at their home on April 17, 2021. The couple fell out when the woman said she wanted to quit her job selling tamales and start cleaning houses. Mr Mora, she said, didn’t want her to do it. “He threw a ball at me,” she wrote. “He grabbed my right hand and pushed” and “he acted like a madman.”
The woman said she called a friend from the church to pick her up. The next day she called the police. She wrote that Mr. Mora “expressed a desire to kill himself” and he was “put in the hospital for a week and treated for psychosis.”
The woman said that she and the children had moved out of the house they shared with Mr. Mora. According to her, the children were witnesses of his behavior. “They were scared and crying. My eldest daughter bit her nails.”
Earlier that month, Mr. Mora kicked a woman so hard she left a bruise on her left leg after she said she shouldn’t have had sex with him, according to court documents.
And in February 2020, a woman wrote that Mr Mora threatened to kill her if he ever caught her cheating. She also said that Mr. Mora is “a very jealous person” who “strangled me in the past”.
The woman said that Mr. Mora did not threaten her with a weapon and did not have it with him. It is unclear how he obtained the weapon he used on Monday. The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to an email asking for comment on Wednesday.
Restraining orders have become an important tool for victims of domestic violence to keep them safe, although their enforcement has sometimes been problematic. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health found that in a study of 231 women killed by their male partners, 11% received restraining orders. Of these, about a third of the women were killed within a month of receiving a restraining order.
On May 19, 2021, the California Supreme Court in Sacramento sentenced the woman to five years in a restraining order. In it, the couple agreed to allow Mr Mora to visit the couple’s children “up to four hours per supervised visit” of a man identified by church records and the coroner’s office as Nathaniel Kong. (The man’s last name is listed in court records as “Alcon.”) The man who answered the phone listed for Mr. Kong’s wife said on Wednesday she was unable to speak.
Asking for a restraining order, the woman said she was concerned about Mr. Mora’s “mental stability” and wanted his visits with the children to be “supervised by my friend.”
If Mr Kong was unavailable, the couple agreed to have the agency supervise the visits at Mr More’s expense, under a restraining order.
Such expenses can be expensive. According to Dr. April Hayes, executive director of the monitoring and consulting organization, professional visitation monitors can cost anywhere from $40 to $100 an hour.
Hayes, who has worked in the field for about two decades, says Sacramento no longer provides a federal grant to help low-income parents pay some of the costs of these visits.
Parents who can’t afford the cost of professional monitors, she says, often make arrangements with well-meaning but unprofessional monitors and may arrange meetings at churches or restaurants, where it’s harder to enforce precautions.
In 2012, Dr. Hayes said she was attacked by a parent whose visit she followed at church.
Referring to controlled meetings at her agency, Dr. Hayes said, “We have a lockdown process in place.” To ensure security, agency staff sometimes used wands to test parents, she said. While such security measures are effective, parents don’t always appreciate them in what may already seem like a contentious environment, Dr. Hayes said. “Parents who are supervised feel like victims.”
“I really wish there was a better system,” she said, “but I don’t know what the answer is.”