He was working behind the Thrifty ice cream counter when they first met. She was 15 and shopping with her father and sister at a Rite Aid on Palmdale’s east side.
Wearing earrings, tight jeans and gel in his hair, 17-year-old Jesse Carrillo eyed Nora Villanueva Campanor as she shopped.
“He looks like a player,” her sister warned.
But Nora liked his style and soon she and Carrillo were dating. A year later, she was pregnant.
Their daughter was born on Valentine’s Day in 2012. Nora was 17.
Nora and Jesse were married the following spring at a courthouse in Lancaster. Their second child, a son, was born a year after that.
The relationship had been troubled since the beginning. Carrillo was controlling and jealous, according to Nora’s family members. He put a tracker on her car and forbade her from even going to the gym, they said.
Nora’s sister, Jazmin Villanueva, said he got into shouting matches with Nora and once hit her mother and pushed her down several steps during a bad argument.
Nora’s loved ones knew she was being mistreated, but they said she didn’t talk about it because she didn’t want them to worry.
“She was a church girl. She was focused on school,” Jazmin said.
In April 2024, according to court records, Carrillo was arrested after Nora reported that their daughter said he had sexually abused her. Two days later, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department released him from custody, citing insufficient evidence to charge him.
Then, after stalking her for four months, Carrillo abducted Nora and shot and killed her at an intersection in Lancaster.
She was one of at least 63 women killed in 2024 and 2025 in L.A. County with a former partner or close relative who was arrested or charged with their murder, according to a Times analysis of medical examiner data. The deaths accounted for over 40% of the 156 women killed during that period.
At least 10 of those, including Nora, had filed for restraining orders, and four — including hers — were granted by judges.
Nora’s life and brutal death reveal a system that tried, and ultimately failed, to protect a young mother from an abuser, reflecting the challenges women face when they turn to law enforcement and the courts for protection from domestic violence.
At home after her middle school let out on April 17, 2024, Nora’s daughter came to her crying and shaking. She needed to tell her mother “something important, but it might break our family apart,” Nora wrote on the restraining order request form she submitted several days later.
The daughter, who was 12 at the time, told her Carrillo had been sexually abusing her since she was 4 or 5 years old. The Times is withholding the names of their children because they are minors.
“[D]addy has done weird stuff to me since I was little,” she said, according to Nora’s typed account. She wrote that her daughter said Carrillo had raped her and subjected her to a range of sexual abuse.
Nora had stayed with her husband through years of psychological and physical abuse. She wrote in court filings that she had been battered, threatened and manipulated. But after hearing her daughter’s allegations, Nora told her family she knew she and her children had to leave as soon as possible.
Nora was concerned about custody and how she would raise their two growing kids solo. She hadn’t worked since January 2021, when she quit her job as a McDonald’s manager to enroll at Antelope Valley College. At 29 years old, she was still a few months away from graduating with an associate’s degree in kinesiology. She was working as a physical education teacher and wanted to be a personal trainer.
More immediately, Nora was worried Carrillo would see them leaving on the video camera he’d installed in the hallway, according to Jazmin’s husband, Angel Pulido.
“She talked to the kids and guided them on how to not be seen on camera,” Angel recalled during an interview at the couple’s house in Palmdale. “She left with nothing, just her kids and her car. She was crying, she was panicking, she was in shock.”
Nora rushed the kids out to her Honda Pilot before Carrillo got home from work. She left their home in Western Skies Mobile Home Park and drove four miles west to the Lancaster sheriff’s station.
Nora filled out a form requesting an emergency protective order and reported her and her daughter’s abuse. A judge promptly granted the order, which required Carrillo to move out of their home “immediately.” It also barred him from contacting Nora and their kids, or coming within 250 yards of them, their home, their schools and other places they frequented.
Sheriff’s deputies arrested him that evening and brought him to the Lancaster station, where he was served with the order, according to court records and a statement by the Sheriff’s Department.
Two days later, the department presented its investigation into Carrillo’s alleged sexual abuse to the district attorney’s office, which declined to prosecute. He was released soon thereafter.
Nora’s emergency protective order was set to expire in less than a week.
Nora was born in Mexico and brought to the U.S. by her parents when she was 3. Although her family says she was shielded from deportation by Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era policy for certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, she was not yet a naturalized citizen, so she was wary of interacting with law enforcement. But with Carrillo back on the street and probably very angry, it was imperative that she do everything she could to protect herself and her children.
So on April 22 — two days before her emergency protective order was set to expire — Nora filed a request for a domestic violence restraining order. On the form, she wrote that Carrillo had sexually assaulted her, threatened her with a machete and repeatedly told her he was going to kill her.
Nora was granted a temporary restraining order later that day. It imposed many of the same restrictions as the emergency order, but it wouldn’t go into full effect until Carrillo had been physically served with a copy. “The sheriff or marshal,” it stated, “will serve this order for free.”
In 2024, the Sheriff’s Department attempted to serve Carrillo with a restraining order at least once, several days after it was issued, according to department data obtained via public records request. The data said the attempt was unsuccessful because “Per resident, defendant does not live at location.”
Angel and Jazmin said that no one else lived at the mobile home and that the landlord at Western Skies told them that law enforcement never showed up there.
“The Sheriff’s Department? Nowhere to be found,” Angel said. “We’re asking them, can you help us track Jesse down so they could serve him? And crickets, just no response.”
The Sheriff’s Department pointed to a portion of the California Code of Civil Procedure that requires “reasonable diligence.”
“Deputies must make several service attempts (3 attempts) at various times, including days, nights, and weekends,” the department said in a statement. “In some cases, surveillance may be used. We may contact neighbors or property managers without sharing unnecessary case details. We will also try to locate the respondent’s workplace.”
The department’s Court Services Division is responsible for serving a range of court documents, including restraining orders. But the staff of around 2,100 is also tasked with other functions, including transporting jail inmates and providing security at county courthouses.
With more than 18,500 requests for domestic violence restraining orders filed countywide in the 2024-2025 fiscal year, plus thousands of civil harassment restraining orders and criminal protective orders, the workload can be overwhelming, officials said.
Domestic violence survivors and their advocates say deputies don’t do enough to ensure restraining orders are served.
In 24% of cases from 2015 to 2025 in which deputies marked people they were attempting to serve with restraining orders as “not found,” deputies reported that they left without serving them because there was no answer at their home addresses, according to department data. Another 15% in those years failed because the person did not live at the address where they attempted service.
In instances where deputies were successful, it took an average of six days for them to serve an order last year. More than 11% of successful service attempts took place at least two weeks after an order was granted, the data show.
The Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that it “is committed to ensuring restraining orders are served and enforced in a timely and lawful manner,” but “there are some barriers” that make the process more difficult.
“For example, delays can occur when respondents intentionally evade service, are unhoused and unable to be located, or when service documents contain invalid or inaccurate information, such as a respondent’s physical address,” the statement said.
Yvette Lozano, deputy executive director of Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit that provides services to domestic violence survivors, said women are often left to pursue service on their own. She said perpetrators of domestic violence often take advantage of such situations.
“As long as they’re not served,” Lozano said, “they don’t have to go by that order, and they could continue to intimidate, coerce, stalk, harass that survivor.”
Around 10 a.m. on May 6, 2024, Nora went back to the mobile home where she, Carrillo and their children had lived for years. Fourteen days had passed since her temporary restraining order was granted. But it still hadn’t been served.
She only planned on stopping by briefly to check the mail and pay the rent. But her husband was apparently following her movements so closely that he showed up at the mobile home seconds after she arrived.
She was on the phone with Jazmin when Carrillo pushed his way in through a side door as Nora tried to hold it closed.
“Call 911! Call 911! Call 911! Jazmin, he’s here!” Nora screamed as soon as she realized Carrillo was outside. The dramatic moment was captured by a Ring camera inside the home. “Get the f– away from me!”
He grabbed Nora from behind and held out a knife, imploring her to plunge it into his abdomen.
“Here, just stab me,” he said as Nora struggled to escape his grasp. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he added. “I need you to do it to me. Please, baby.”
After about a minute, Nora pushed Carrillo down onto a couch, broke free and fled through the front door as a piercing siren started blaring from the Ring camera. Instead of following her outside, the footage shows him closing the front door, then pulling the camera down from its perch on the wall above the kitchen. Nora’s sister and brother-in-law, Jazmin and Angel, called 911 from their home as they watched the incident unfold in real time via the Ring camera.
The sheriff’s deputies who responded asked for Carrillo’s phone number. They called him and he “refused to meet them in person,” according to Angel’s contemporaneous notes. The deputies declined to pursue him any further at that point, Jazmin recalled.
“Me and Angel kept begging, ‘Can’t you guys track his phone and go get him?” she said. “They said, ‘We don’t go looking for people.’”
The Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that after Carrillo declined to meet them, a “crime broadcast and Emergency Broadcast Bulletin were transmitted over the radio to Lancaster and Palmdale Station units in an effort to locate and apprehend the suspect.”
When deputies respond to calls reporting intimate partner violence, they often encounter what can be perceived as he said-she said situations, according to law enforcement officials. They said strong evidence can be hard to come by, survivors drop cases after making up with their abusers, and the circumstances often don’t meet the standard to make an arrest.
Yet calls about intimate partner violence are among the most volatile that law enforcement regularly handle, authorities say. Domestic altercations can quickly spin out of control, making them among the most dangerous types of calls.
Each year from 2015 to 2024, law enforcement agencies across the state reported receiving between 160,000 and 170,000 domestic violence-related calls annually, according to California Department of Justice data.
Later on May 6, Carrillo texted Nora a screenshot of his location on Google Maps. He was two blocks from Angel’s house in Palmdale, where Nora, Angel, Jazmin and their kids had gathered after the incident at the mobile home.
Jazmin called 911 to report that Carrillo was so close to them within hours of confronting Nora. A deputy who arrived more than an hour later informed Nora and her terrified family members that her ex had been injured in a car crash. A deputy went to the house in Palmdale later to give them documentation showing that Carrillo had been served with the temporary restraining order at the hospital. The order was already a week from expiring.
The Sheriff’s Department said that the day after Carrillo was hospitalized, detectives presented a “misdemeanor spousal battery case to the district attorney’s office for filing consideration. The case was rejected.”
Angel found the situation maddening.
“Another opportunity to do something and they don’t do anything,” Angel said. “If he had been arrested on May 6 … then he would have been stopped.”
In a recent slide deck, professionals from the Los Angeles Police Department, the office of the L.A. city attorney’s office and a city task force focused on domestic violence restraining orders cited a multi-state Johns Hopkins University study, which found that 11% of women killed by males with whom they had intimate relationships had been issued a restraining order. One-fifth of those women were killed within two days of receiving a temporary restraining order, and one-third were killed within a month.
“That time when the victim is leaving, filing a restraining order and going through that process is the most dangerous time of the victim’s life,” said Lourdes Galvan, an attorney on the nonprofit Survivor Justice Center’s family law team.
Carrillo repeatedly violated the letter of Nora’s restraining order, according to her family members. In addition to imposing restrictions on him, the order also included boilerplate instructions for law enforcement, including clear directions under a header with the words “Arrest Required if Order Is Violated” in bold letters.
But those kinds of instructions frequently go unheeded by law enforcement, according to people who work with domestic violence survivors, including Paula Savage, special counsel on family law at the nonprofit Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.
Savage said many of her clients face “roadblocks at every single point” in the process of obtaining a restraining order and getting it served and enforced. Even with the help of attorneys at the clinics the foundation runs at courthouses in downtown L.A. and Long Beach, she said, survivors often find it nearly impossible to convince the Sheriff’s Department to serve or enforce the orders.
The Sheriff’s Department said that once it receives paperwork about a newly issued restraining order it “attempts service based on the restrained person’s address and the written instructions specifying what, who, and where to serve the Restraining Order.”
When abusers violate orders that have been served, if there is no “serious, visible harm” to their victims, Savage said law enforcement will often decline to make an arrest or investigate further.
“If the officers would take it seriously from the first 911 call, and they did the investigation … then it would be on them to gather evidence and investigate, instead of the women having to do that,” Savage said.
The Sheriff’s Department’s policy manual emphasizes the importance of responding promptly to dangerous situations such as Nora’s, stating that “Field personnel receiving family violence calls for service shall handle them without delay.”
Carrillo stalked Nora, called her incessantly and sent her letters, bouquets and text messages for months after she left, Jazmin said. Angel kept a detailed spreadsheet of numerous incidents and unwanted communications involving Carrillo over that period.
Yet Angel said a Sheriff’s Department detective who investigated the abuse allegations against Carrillo repeatedly declined pleas by Nora and her family members to arrest him for recurring violations of the restraining order and do more to investigate the child sexual abuse claims.
The department disputed the assertion that the detective declined the family’s pleas.
“The detective advised the family to contact the local Sheriff’s Station or call 911 to report any alleged restraining order violations so that nearby patrol personnel could respond and investigate the allegations,” the department said in a statement.
Jazmin believes more should have been done.
“My sister kept asking, ‘What evidence are you asking for? I’ve given you so much evidence,’” she said. “They said they needed dates and times, and my niece said, ‘It was on Christmas, it was on Easter,’ but they said it was too vague.”
On Aug. 3, 2024, Nora decided to have a Saturday night out for the first time in months to celebrate receiving her kinesiology degree. She hadn’t even gone out on May 27 to ring in her 30th birthday because she was so worried about what Carrillo might do if he found out.
Nora was feeling less terrified of her former partner and increasingly hopeful that his abuse was in the past. The L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services had gotten involved, and on May 24, Nora had made a request for a restraining order for her and her kids in children’s court.
Angel said she was granted a temporary order that remained in place that weekend in August 2024. Because the case was in children’s court, the records are not public and her family members do not have access to them.
Nora and Carrillo, Angel added, were due to appear in court on Aug. 6 to determine whether the order should be made permanent.
“She told me, ‘I finally feel free,’” said Lynn Gardner, who helped Nora from April to August 2024 after the two met via Gardner’s work as lead case manager for a program for abuse survivors treated at an Antelope Valley emergency room.
That clear summer evening, Nora went out with a female co-worker, Jazmin said. Later in the night, she gave a male co-worker a ride to his house in Lancaster.
According to the Sheriff’s Department’s recounting of the events in an Aug. 4, 2024, statement, at 12:15 that morning, a “male Hispanic adult suspect” confronted another man and “a female Hispanic adult” referred to as the victim at the second man’s house in Lancaster.
The department didn’t release their names, but Carrillo and Nora were the suspect and victim. The other man was Nora’s co-worker, according to Angel and Jazmin.
When they got to the house, Angel said, Nora saw that Carrillo had followed her. Nora yelled “He’s here, he’s here!” to her co-worker and the two of them quickly ran inside and locked the door.
Carrillo fired one round into the man’s house that didn’t hit anyone, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Nora’s co-worker escaped through a back window and Carrillo effectively kidnapped Nora, leading her out to the car at gunpoint, according to Angel and Jazmin.
In the department’s telling, the couple got into an argument while Carrillo was driving, got out of the car together at an intersection in Lancaster at 12:29 a.m. on Aug. 4, and continued arguing. But, according to Jazmin, Nora had jumped out of the car at an intersection and started running away. Nora tried to open the doors of a nearby car, but he caught up with her before she could convince the occupants to let her in, a passenger of that vehicle told Jazmin.
Carrillo shot Nora once in her face below her right eye and drove away, leaving her body on the ground. She was pronounced dead at 12:42 a.m. The L.A. County medical examiner ultimately declared her death a homicide by gunshot wound to the head.
At about 2:09 a.m., Carrillo drove to Palmdale and shot himself inside Nora’s car outside of a family member’s house, the Sheriff’s Department’s statement said, a reference to Angel’s house, where Nora and her two children had been staying since that April.
Carrillo was taken to Antelope Valley Medical Center, where he died two days later at 32 years old. The medical examiner’s office ruled his death a suicide by gunshot wound to the head.
Nora’s death could have been prevented, Gardner said, if the authorities had been more proactive in their response to the threat Carrillo posed.
“She said no one believed that he was going to kill her,” Gardner said. “She went from a victim to survivor to thriver. And now that she’s in a position of thriving and wanting to have a better future for her children, that light was cut out from her.”
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