Did she need to kill him to save herself? This is the question I ask myself whenever I evaluate a woman charged with killing an abusive husband or boyfriend. I am a forensic psychologist and often interview women who claim to have killed in self defense. It is often difficult to determine whether the threat to their lives are real or whether they killed for a different reason.
The West Hartford police were recently involved in a case where the threat was real. On January 17, 2010, Shengyl Rasim, a 25-year-old mother of two was murdered by her husband, Salemi Ozdemir. Her 6-year-old son called the police a day earlier and Mr. Ozdemir was arrested. He was released after posting bail. Despite multiple 911 calls the next day, Mr. Ozdemir was able to return to the home, where he killed Ms. Rasim and then committed suicide.
Ms. Rasim did the right thing when she called 911. Somehow the system failed and she did not get the protection she needed. Many of the battered women I have interviewed also called the police many times before they killed their partners. Others were too embarrassed or frightened to ask for help. In one particularly heartbreaking case, a young pregnant woman, Mrs. Chen, never even told her family that she was being abused.
I was hired by the district attorney’s office to conduct an evaluation of Ms.Chen’s mental state at the time of the offense. During my interviews Mrs. Chen described years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. She said her husband was extremely jealous and isolated her from others. She became increasingly depressed and felt powerless to escape the marriage. When she became pregnant, she hoped the abuse would stop - it did not. As her due date approached, her husband’s threats became more violent.
Mrs. Chen told me how her husband beat her that last night. He pointed a knife at her as he threatened to kill her and the baby if she allowed her parents to visit after the birth. She recalled, “I was feeling like a zombie, everything became like a dream. I just wanted to die. He was lying down. The lights were off. I went to the other room, saw the hammer, I’m thinking, why is the hammer still in the room? We already fixed the crib. I picked up the hammer. I took the hammer, went into the bedroom and hit him over the head. Then I saw the knife he had left on the nightstand. I stabbed him twice.”
Mrs. Chen went on to tell me how she was convinced that she and her baby should die together. She cut both wrists, sat down, and waited to die. Then, for reasons she could not explain, she called 911. The EMS workers were easily able to get into her bedroom since there were no knobs on the doors. Her husband had removed them one night after she locked him out of their bedroom. The EMS workers rushed her to the hospital just in time to perform an emergency Cesarean and save the baby.
I believed Mrs. Chen’s story. But there was no objective evidence that her husband had abused or threatened her. She had no pictures. She had never called the police. There were, however, hundreds of his demeaning and threatening e-mails on her computer. His cruelty came through loud and clear. Her story and the e-mails were powerful evidence of the physical and emotional abuse she had endured.
I called the assistant district attorney to tell him my conclusions. I was convinced that Mrs. Chen fit the pattern of Battered Woman’s Syndrome. Although I could not decide whether she acted in self defense, I concluded that she believed her life was in danger. The prosecutor decided to offer her a plea of manslaughter with a recommendation that she be released from jail. She was reunited with her baby and left New York City to live with her parents.
I discuss this case in depth in my book The Measure of Madness: Inside the Disturbed and Disturbing Criminal Mind.
