A confession from a Tucson man accused of strangling his girlfriend.

Yet he’s released right after his arrest and offered a plea deal.

The victim, Gracie McDonough, is crying foul saying the Pima County Attorney’s Office isn’t doing enough to protect domestic violence victims.

She and her family are angry calling it a rubber stamp process that’s putting lives in grave danger.

McDonough describes her boyfriend of four years, Angel Carmona Rodriquez, as extremely violent.

They have a son together, but when she recently broke off the relationship , she said, he beat her in her bedroom.

“He just started hitting me, like stomping on me with shoes on, hitting me in the face,” McDonough

In another room, a surveillance camera picked up the sound of her being strangled.

At one point Rodriquez tells her “you are going to die today”.

She said it wasn’t the first time he’s strangled her.

“It happened probably like 50 times throughout our relationship, if not more,” she said.

There are pictures dozens of them depicting years of domestic violence, from bruises to blood.

McDonough finally called the Pima County Sheriff’s Department hoping her nightmare would be over.

But her family says that’s far from the case.

Deputies arrested Rodriquez a week later on charges of kidnapping and impeding breathing, both Class 4 felonies based on state statutes.

That’s after he confessed to the crime during questioning.

We obtained the audio.

In it, he had first denied he strangled her, but later admitted it.

“If I (expletive) hurt her neck and there’s some handprints around there and it’s around the time I guess my (expletives) probably did it,” he said.

The audio reveals detectives showed him pictures and told him they listened to the 12-minute audio of the attack.

It’s unclear whether the judge in his Initial Court Appearance knew about the confession.

The judge released Rodriquez and he’s is out on his own recognizance, the recommendation of Pretrial Services.

The Pima County Attorney Office recommended a $2,500 bond because Rodriquez is a “risk to the community” and there’s a “high risk to reoffend”.

A Grand Jury determined one of the charges wasn’t enough and moved it up from a class 4 to a class 2 felony that comes with a stiffer punishment.

The family thought they had a strong case, which included Angel’s confession, audio of the strangulation and photos of the domestic violence.

So the family was floored when the Pima County Attorney’s Office offered Angel a plea deal.

“The prosecutor came back and offered what they call a class 6 felony,” said Sharon McDonough, her mother.

Court documents show the prosecutor dropped the strangulation charge and reduced the kidnapping count to the Class 6 felony.

The punishment is the least severe of all felony crimes and the family was told the felony can be designated as a misdemeanor in the future.

Sharon McDonough said the plea deal baffled her.

”The commentary was, ‘It’s a he said, she said.’ And we said, ‘Yeah, well this one’s not, because we have this audio.’ And then they say, ‘Well usually you don’t have a willing victim who’s willing to go to court.’ I said, ‘She is. You don’t usually have the proof and the pictures and the willingness to just tell the story and here you have it. You have all the pieces,’” she said.

After fighting against the plea deal the Pima County Attorney’s Office revoked it.

A prosecutor dropped the Class 2 felony kidnapping charge, but brought back the Class 4 felony strangulation charge.

Sharon McDonough says a prosecutor later apologized for the first plea deal and thanked her daughter for being brave enough to report the attack. But it only happened, the family said, because they fought for it

KOLD reached out to County Attorney Laura Conover requesting a sit down interview on this strangulation case and the protocols.

She declined and sent a statement instead.

“As always, PCAO doesn’t comment on the facts of a specific case while it is pending in court, under Arizona rules 3.6 and 3.8 and to preserve a fair trial for the accused.

When talking about domestic violence cases, we can point out generally that most of these cases come in as an emergency after a trauma has occurred. That means there is limited information presented to both the Court and our office in order to hold the initial court appearance and open the criminal file. However, prior to offering a plea agreement, we review the evidence, criminal history, nature of the charges, and potential sentence at trial. A plea is then drafted and sent to the victim to review and offer input. If a victim does not approve, we meet with the victim and reevaluate the plea. If additional evidence is discovered, such as disturbing audio or video evidence, a case will also be reevaluated. The plea offer may change, more serious charges might be added, or the case may even be determined to be a trial-only case.

Far from a rubber stamp, these domestic violence professionals stay in constant analysis and in constant communication with victims who choose to participate.”

We are far from done with this strangulation case as our investigation “A ‘Plea’ for Help” continues.

Source: Valerie Cavazos, NEWS 13. Click here to view original post. 

A Utah woman claims she received death threats from a former police chief who resigned from his job and later played a prominent role as a patrol officer in the 2021 traffic stop of Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie.

“He has no business being a f—ing cop,” the woman, who has asked not to have her name published out of concerns for her safety, told Fox News Digital.

She was talking about Eric Pratt, one of two Moab police officers who interacted with Petito and Laundrie in the entranceway to Arches National Park just two weeks before her strangling death in Wyoming.

She is accusing him of telling her he’d smash her with a crowbar after she threatened to go public with sultry details of their 2017 affair.

“If the officer responding to Gabby’s situation is an abuser himself who would threaten a girlfriend’s life, it makes sense why he believed Gabby’s abuser and ignored her injuries,” Nichole Schmidt, Petito’s mother, told Fox News Wednesday. “With him in charge, I don’t think Gabby stood a chance.”

The handling of the Petito-Laundrie call, first reported by Fox News Digital, resulted in no arrests or citations despite a Utah law requiring such actions following domestic violence incidents, prompted an independent investigation that faulted the officers for “unintentional mistakes” after they deemed Petito, not Laundrie to be the aggressor.

The Utah woman said she contacted attorneys for Petito’s parents after learning Pratt had been promoted to detective and made a school resource officer in Moab. He had resigned from his role as Salina police chief in 2017, according to a letter he wrote at the time. She says the move came after she confronted the mayor about his alleged mistreatment of her.

In 2017, the woman said, she was going through a divorce, and Pratt was still married to the ex-wife he mentions on bodycam video during a conversation with Laundrie.

The two had known each other for years, and began a sexual relationship that morphed into an “emotional friendship,” she said. At one point, she said, her conscience caught up with her and she disclosed her affair and other alleged trysts to Pratt’s then-wife.

They had a contentious falling out, she said, and she told the mayor to get him to leave her alone, or she’d go public with the affair and intimate details.

“I had already gone to mayor, [and] he was preparing to resign,” she said.

It had been about two weeks since they’d last spoke, and she was shopping at Walmart with her daughter when she ran into him.

He followed her out of the parking lot to a gas station in Richfield, she said, flashing the lights of his personal vehicle behind her.

“He went to back seat and started talking to my daughter, telling her how adults don’t always see eye-to-eye but in the end hopefully everybody can be friends,” she said.

Then he went in, bought the girl some candy.

“He came around to my window and told me that if anything ever got out he’d kill me with a crowbar,” the woman alleged.

About a year later, she claimed he asked her to meet him at a Denny’s restaurant. She did, they had a long talk, and she left with “peace of mind.”

“I didn’t have to be looking over my shoulder anymore, anything like that,” she said.

But, she said, he allegedly made another alarming statement during the conversation: “Had this been the day prior, there would have been a grave dug and you would’ve been in it.”

“I asked him what changed his mind about not wanting to kill me anymore, and he said he had decided that it wasn’t me that had ruined his life, it was one of the other girls that he had an affair with,” she claimed.

A man has been arrested and charged in the killing of his wife more than a year after her body was found, according to Texas police. Fidel Baquin, 33, was arrested Oct. 27, Houston Police Department said in an Oct. 28 news release. Baquin is charged with murder in the 2021 death of Stephanie Marie Hernandez, 42. The department’s investigation began Sept. 11, 2021, after witnesses reported trash bags leaking blood that were covered in flies and had a foul odor, KTRK reported.

Inside the bags, which were located on Sandpiper Drive in southwest Houston, was Hernandez, police said. The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences later determined Hernandez’s cause of death was ligature strangulation. Baquin is in custody at the Harris County Jail, KPRC reported. His bail is set at $350,000.

Source: Moira Ritter, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Click here to view original post. 

A new report shows there were 112 domestic violence-related deaths in Ohio in a recent 12-month period, including 22 youth, the highest number in the past seven years.

Officials noted every domestic violence death is a tragedy, but advocates said data this year on youth fatalities is truly shocking. The Ohio Domestic Violence Network report on domestic violence-related fatalities reveals the highest number of youth fatalities since the count began seven years ago.

Lisa DeGeeter, director of Systems and Policy for the Ohio Domestic Violence Network, said there were 16 kids younger than age 10 and six infants in the total number of deceased people.

“Most of them, quite literally, babes in arms that were shot while the mothers were holding them,” DeGeeter said. “The youngest victim was actually a one-day-old baby. The mom was eight and a half months pregnant and was shot in the abdomen. She was delivered before the mom passed, but the baby died of her own gunshot injuries the next day.”

DeGeeter also expressed concern over the number of gun related fatalities that occurred over the last year, up 5 percent to 91 percent.

The fatalities tracked between July 2021 and June 2022 were compiled from media reports and information from the Domestic Violence Network’s member programs.