On April 16th, Dr. Cerina Fairfax was shot and killed by her husband, the former lieutenant governor of Virginia, Justin Fairfax, who then fatally shot himself, according to the police. Three days later, the police say, a man in Louisiana named Shamar Elkins shot and killed eight children — seven of them his own — and critically injured his wife and a second woman, with whom he shared three children. At least one of these men had threatened suicide before the killings and both obtained access to guns; both wives wanted to end their marriages and separation was imminent. Sadly, both tragedies may well have been prevented.
Mr. Fairfax was ordered by a judge to vacate the family home by the end of the month. After losing his bid for governor in 2021 and leaving public office in 2022, he struggled with underemployment and alcoholism. In recent years, he’d become increasingly isolated. In court documents, Dr. Fairfax said her husband was spending extended time alone in his room and littering the home with dirty laundry and empty wine bottles.
As details in an unraveling life, they may be typical, but taken together, along with what else we know — that Mr. Fairfax bought a gun in 2022, that he had problems with alcohol and was ordered to take breathalyzer tests before visiting his kids and that a final separation was near — they are markers of escalating dangerousness.
Less is known about Mr. Elkins. He was a National Guard veteran who had a felony weapons conviction that most likely barred him from possessing a gun, and family members say he had struggled with his mental health. “Some people don’t come back from their demons,” his stepfather said Mr. Elkins told him in recent days. He also told his mother and stepfather that his wife wanted a divorce.
For domestic violence experts, all of these details would have been flashing warning signs. The domestic-violence field has developed a 20-question survey called a Danger Assessment that can help predict and ultimately prevent domestic violence homicide. Included among the markers are former acts of domestic violence; threats of suicide, homicide or harm to children; access to a gun; strangulation or choking; forced sex; stalking; and habitual use of drugs and alcoholism. The survey also prompts respondents to create a timeline of abuse to assess escalation. Though training is required to determine scores since the questions are weighted, the Danger Assessment would at least offer the nonexpert an immediate snapshot of potential lethality.
The Danger Assessment was created in 1986 by a nurse and graduate student, Jacquelyn Campbell, who is now a nursing professor at Johns Hopkins University and a leading researcher on domestic violence. Early on, it was used in emergency rooms and doctors’ offices. But around 2005, a Massachusetts-based domestic violence agency called the Geiger Institute (on whose board I serve) adapted the Danger Assessment for what it named “high-risk teams.” The institute collaborated with Professor Campbell to rework the Danger Assessment for a variety of contexts, creating a model to bring together teams of advocates for victims of domestic violence, law enforcement and other community stakeholders.
In addition to doing safety planning with victims, a high-risk team may ask the police for extra drive-bys, change door locks, install camera systems or help survivors get temporary protection orders that limit gun purchases by perpetrators or require them to wear ankle bracelets for monitoring. Today, there are nearly a hundred confirmed high-risk teams operating across the United States (and probably many more) and they have likely prevented countless homicides.
The problem isn’t that the Danger Assessment isn’t known or used; it’s that it’s not known or used nearly enough. Many lawyers who work on civil divorce cases don’t know about it. Even in criminal cases, courts generally don’t allow it as evidence. And law enforcement may use truncated versions of it — asking domestic-violence victims just a few of the questions, often because of limited time on a call.
But many jurisdictions don’t use it at all. Domestic violence agencies are its primary users. Unfortunately, many victims of domestic violence will never interact with an agency; many, in fact, never interact with the police either.
But they will interact with clergy members. With therapists. With school guidance counselors and friends and family members. They will interact with divorce lawyers. This is why the Danger Assessment should be used widely, with as many professionals as possible being trained in how to administer it. Law schools should include it in their curriculum. Judges should allow it as evidence of dangerousness. And public marketing campaigns should raise community awareness.
Just weeks ago, the judge in the Fairfax divorce noted that Mr. Fairfax’s drinking and isolation were “manifestations of what seems to be a sense of fatalism and hopelessness.” Court documents note that he purchased a handgun in 2022 before experiencing what was termed an “adverse psychological event.” Virginia has an “extreme risk protection order” law, sometimes called a red flag law, which allows for the temporary removal of guns when someone is highly dangerous. Yet Mr. Fairfax was either allowed to keep his gun or he obtained another one.
It is a glaring example of a systemic failing. It is, in fact, precisely what red flag laws were intended to address.
Louisiana has no such law. Still, Mr. Elkins, who had a weapons felony conviction that likely barred him from owning a firearm, got a gun from someone he knew, according to the police. Hopefully, the Louisiana Legislature will see the killings as impetus to pass a red flag law, even though, unfortunately, such a law would not have helped in this case. But I can’t help wondering, given that people around Mr. Elkins understood he was struggling, whether they knew of the Danger Assessment and, if not, whether knowing might have led them to be more proactive.
Neither the Danger Assessment nor red flag laws are foolproof, of course. Nothing ever is. But what matters, particularly at that extremely dangerous moment of separation, is disrupting a moment of violence. Take the guns. Communicate to victims the potential danger of their situations. And keep more people, especially children, alive.
There is much we don’t know about the Fairfax and Elkins shootings. The fact that Dr. Fairfax had cameras installed inside her home recently speaks to her level of concern. There are only two reasons to install inside cameras: control of someone or fear of someone.
What we do know is that the Council on Criminal Justice reports that domestic violence was the only offense that increased in the first half of 2025 compared with the first half of the previous year. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, nearly five women a day on average were killed in the United States by an intimate partner in 2021. And guns are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in America.
Dr. Cerina Fairfax may have had a sense of foreboding without understanding what all the signs meant collectively. Surely those eight children in Louisiana never had the slightest idea of the level of danger they were in. But the rest of us could have.
Rachel Louise Snyder (@RLSWrites) is a professor of creative writing and journalism at American University. She is the author of “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us” and “Women We Buried, Women We Burned.”
Source photograph by Artem Hvozdkov/Getty Images.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Warning Signs Were There in Louisiana. Why Did We Miss Them? appeared first on New York Times.
