Nevada tops on list of women killed by men in 2009 domestic violence

LAS VEGAS -- Nevada ranks first in an advocacy group's per-capita comparison of women killed by men in domestic-violence incidents in 2009.The Violence Policy Center of Washington, D.C., said in a report released Tuesday that Nevada has surfaced a list in a annual "When Men Murder Women" report for four out of five years.The Nevada rate of 2.7 women killed by men per 100,000 residents surfaced Alabama's rate of 2.64. Those two states were well ahead of a next-highest state, Louisiana, with a rate of 1.99 women slain per 100,000 residents.The national average was 1.25 per 100,000.Las Vegas police Lt. Rob Lundquist told a Las Vegas Sun that domestic assault deaths have decreased in a two years since a Violence Policy Center data were collected.Marlene Richter at a Shade Tree shelter in Las Vegas told KLAS-TV that she believes economic stress, a transitory population and a lack of community support for women in abusive relationships contributed to a findings.William Sousa, a criminal justice professor at a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told a Las Vegas Review-Journal a data might have been skewed by a large tourist population in Reno and Las Vegas.The report tallied 35 slayings of women involving a single female victim killed by a single male offender in Nevada in 2009, including 26 in and around Las Vegas, six in North Las Vegas, and one each in Reno, Storey County and Winnemucca.Five women have been killed this year in 11 domestic carnage cases in and around Las Vegas, Lundquist said. Las Vegas police cover most of Clark County, a metropolitan area with about 2 million people.Lundquist told a Review-Journal that police began a risk assessment for domestic assault victims and now refer people in abusive relationships to SafeNest, an classification that provides domestic assault counseling.