Act against violence
kansas.com
Opinion
Posted on Tue, Aug. 30, 2011

Little girls should not be slain in their sleep. Not here. Not anywhere. Yet Wichita is grieving such a 6-year-old — killed during an attack early Thursday in which her 9-year-old sister was severely wounded and her mother and grandmother were injured. In the process, Wichita also has lost the sense that its neighborhoods are safe from such a horrible crime of domestic violence.

Many will see Reimy Rivera’s murder at the hands of her mother’s ex-boyfriend, Joel Humberto Corrales-Vega, as an infuriating example of the failings of the U.S. immigration system. Corrales-Vega had been convicted of felony aggravated assault five years ago in Arizona and deported twice. He should not have been in the country, let alone in a position to kick in the door on South Stoney Point and start going room to room and using a large-caliber handgun to hurt his ex-girlfriend’s family, before shooting himself fatally in the head.

But the murder also exemplifies a disturbing trend of increasing domestic violence in Wichita.

Reimy was the community’s sixth domestic-violence homicide of the year, equaling the number for all of 2010. This year also is running ahead of last year for aggravated batteries, aggravated assaults and simple assaults categorized as domestic violence.

In fact, incidents related to domestic violence spiked statewide after the economy began its nosedive in 2008. The state’s domestic-violence deaths, for example, went from 19 in 2008 to 35 in 2009. The Wichita rampage came the day before James Kraig Kahler was convicted of capital murder in a November 2009 case in Burlingame just as shocking, in which Kahler’s estranged wife, their two teenage daughters and his wife’s grandmother were murdered. “When they were no longer the Cleavers, no longer perfect, he kills them,â€