Authorities say the shooter at Cook’s Corner, John Patrick Snowling, was taking his marital complaints, however misguided, public.
If true, experts say it’s the latest in a long string of examples of how marital friction, guns and silence can combine to end in death.
Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes said this week that Snowling, a 59-year-old retired Ventura Police Department sergeant, was specifically targeting his soon-to-be ex-wife when he walked into the family-friendly biker bar in Trabuco Canyon on Wednesday, Aug. 23 and shot nine people, killing three.
That his wife was among those who were gravely injured, not killed, and that Snowling died during a shootout with Orange County Sheriff’s deputies, not by his own hand, are only slight variations in what experts describe as a grim pattern: When domestic violence escalates to its apex and turns deadly, what was private often becomes public, and the range of victims often spreads beyond the fighting couple.
It’s also not rare.
In Orange County, an intimate partner, usually a wife or girlfriend, is killed about once every six weeks, usually by a current or former partner, such as a husband or boyfriend. That statistic comes out of a 2022 report by researchers at UC Irvine, who tracked 11 years’ worth of county data connected to local domestic-violence-related homicides.
Cases studied in the Domestic Violence Fatality Review resulted in 113 fatalities, including intimate partners and children and strangers, as well the killers themselves, about a third of whom died by suicide.
Anecdotally, domestic violence has been part of several local high-profile homicides – from an Aug. 3 shooting in which an allegedly inebriated Orange County Superior Court judge allegedly drew a gun from an ankle holster and used it to shoot his wife, to the 2011 massacre at Salon Meritage in Seal Beach, in which an angry ex-husband shot and killed his ex-wife and seven others.
It’s unclear if the violence that…
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