Utah law enforcement officials are struggling to answer questions about their efforts to help a University of Utah student who was murdered by a man she’d reported for harassing her weeks earlier.
Lauren McCluskey was shot and killed by Melvin Rowland on campus Monday night. Rowland killed himself later the same evening. McCluskey first reported Rowland’s harassment to campus police on October 12, lodging a second complaint the following day.
Earlier that week, McCluskey had ended a brief romantic relationship with Rowland, 37, after discovering he’d lied about his age and concealed a criminal history that included convictions for rape and soliciting sex with a minor. Rowland’s felony convictions mean it was illegal for him to purchase or own a gun, but Utah law enforcement figures refused to answer questions about how he’d gotten his weapon at a Tuesday news conference.
Dale Brophy, chief of the university’s police department, did say Tuesday that his officers hadn’t been able to respond effectively to McCluskey’s reports about Rowland because he had no fixed address. But a Department of Corrections spokeswoman said Brophy was wrong about that, telling the Salt Lake Tribune that Rowland was living at the address listed for him on the state’s sex offender registry.
Killed less than two weeks after breaking off her one-month relationship with Rowland, McCluskey joins a tragically large sorority. Men murder women they previously had romantic or familial ties with at a staggering rate. Out of 1,686 women murdered in the U.S. in 2015, 928 “were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.” That works out to roughly three women killed by domestic partners — current or former — each day nationwide. Women are 14 times as likely to be killed by someone they know as by a stranger.
Those statistics come only from single-victim, single-perpatrator homicide records compiled by federal law enforcement officials. But male violence against women whose romantic attention they either had or wanted is also a common theme in mass shootings. One review of the 93 mass shootings perpetrated between the start of 2009 and the third quarter of 2013 in the U.S. found that a current or former intimate partner or other family member was killed in almost 60 percent of the massacres. Former Vice President Joe Biden has said that 40 percent of mass shootings from 2009 to 2012 began with the killer murdering a current or former intimate partner, citing a White House analysis.
Male mass killers in other high-profile attacks have explicitly identified their perception that women in general denied them sex or romantic connection as the motive for their violence. Elliot Rodger, who wrote a manifesto about being slighted by women he found attractive before he killed six and shot 13 others on a California college campus in 2014, has attained an ugly hero status within the so-called “incel community” of online forums frequented by men angry with women for not liking them. Fellow-traveler lunatic Alek Minassian cited Rodger as the inspiration for his van attack in Toronto earlier this year.
As the statistical and emotional link between this male rage and the murder of women has become more widely understood, it’s also threatened to become subsumed in the own-the-libs ethos of late-stage U.S. political order. Right-wing thinkers popular in the same online gutters that spawned the present revanchist nationalism have taken up the “incel” clarion. Senior public officials credibly accused of domestic violence have become waypoints in the braindead tug-of-war calculus that’s replaced whatever once passed for a political order here, with people who would have once been chased out of public life by their own politician-employers instead becoming causes for a morally blind partisan grievance machine — and candidates for rehabilitation in the right-wing media, so long as they are self-identified conservatives.
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