Preventable Crimes, Lamentable Justice

WASHINGTON - Among court officials, police and journalists in Boston, the death of Kristin Lardner, a 21-year-old art student, on May 30 has become known as the Brookline murder. Few recent homicides have received as much publicity. On June 1, the story ran as the page-one lead of The Boston Globe, accompanied by a photograph of the young woman. The next day, the Globe used the top of the front page for a follow-up story on the sociopath killer, an ex-boyfriend with a criminal record who, after shooting Kristin Lardner on a Brookline street, went to his apartment and killed himself. On June 3, still another page-one article appeared.

That was Boston. In my workplace, where George Lardner, Kristin's father, is a veteran Washington Post reporter and a newsman whose byline is synonymous with fairness, digging and integrity, the loss was personal. It was the same in my neighborhood, where Kristin, a life-loving child, went to our local public high school and where a requiem mass was said for her soul at Blessed Sacrament Catholic church.

The grief that has come randomly to George and Rosemary Lardner - Kristin, whose artistic talents were coming into full flower, was the youngest of their five children - can be shared by friends and co-workers. But the depth of pain is knowable only to them. It was a glimpse of that pain, along with the solid reporting of the legal entanglements that preceded the horror of the sidewalk killing, that gripped Boston for much of last week. With only a small measure more of juridical watchfulness, this was crime that should have been - could have been - prevented.

Less than three weeks before her death, Kristin Lardner went into Brookline Municipal Court to ask a judge for a restraining order against the man who would kill her, Michael Cartier. Dictated by facts and common sense, the court issued a temporary restraining order on May 12 and extended it for a year on May 19. A month earlier, Cartier had beaten and kicked Kristin unconscious on a Brookline street. She ended the two-month relationship, but Cartier threatened more harm if she dared report his violence to the police. She did, and he was charged with assault and battery. At the time that Cartier, 23, killed Kristin Lardner, he had served six months in prison and was on probation for beating up an earlier girlfriend. That attack also came after a restraining order.

On one of the days this tragedy was being reported in Boston, the front page of the Prince George's (Md.) Journal had its restraining order story. Out of fear that her estranged husband will break into her Upper Marlboro, Md., home to beat and possibly kill her, Tereasa Bean sleeps with a loaded shotgun. Her husband had been jailed once on battery charges. In addition to fracturing her skull, he once broke a coat hanger and stabbed his wife's left breast with it. When the abusive husband violated a recent restraining order - by stalking his wife - a judge ordered him jailed. Another judge released him.

In the background of the stories of Kristin Lardner and Tereasa Bean is the one statistic that officials in every domestic court, police station and hospital emergency room know to be true: The leading cause of injury among American women is being beaten at home by a man. Nationally, an estimated 4 million men kill or violently attack women they live with or date.

However the causes are analyzed - violent childhoods, cultural glorification of male violence and aggressiveness, the availability of handguns, the absence or weakness of early intervention programs, resentment of women's political and social gains - the one place where an immediate and stronger defense line needs to be drawn is in the courts.

Judges may be the hardest to convince. Commenting on restraining orders, a Boston judge told the Globe: "If someone makes up his mind to commit murder, the courts can't stop him." This is defeatism, precisely the kind of encouragement that male stalkers and sociopaths don't need.

Women who are victims - or potential victims - of violence, have an ally in Judge Albert Kramer, a justice in the Quincy, Mass., district court just south of Boston. Last year, 1,147 battered or abused women came to the Quincy court seeking legal protection, a 35-percent increase over 1990. Because Kramer, beginning in the early 1980s, wanted a protective program that would be effective, he worked with the police, prosecutors, women's groups and probation officials to create a comprehensive effort.

The number of male abusers on strict-supervision probation in Kramer's district is over 200 this year, up from 35 in 1986. The seven towns under the Quincy court's jurisdiction had no domestic homicides in 1991. The next county over had 15.

If the Quincy model had been at work in Brookline, Kristin Lardner and Michael Cartier would likely be alive. She would be safe in her community because he would be either in a strictly supervised program or in jail.

(Copyright, 1992, Washington Post Writers Group)