Boyfriend accused of killing woman in front of her sleeping 5-year-old daughter
Raemel Richardson was reportedly shot in her car in Baton Rouge, and her body was found by a group of children about 40 miles away.
A Louisiana man was accused of killing his girlfriend, Raemel Richardson, in her car last Wednesday. Police allege the woman’s five-year-old daughter was in the vehicle when the shooting happened.
Jonathan Bryant, 35, allegedly shot Richardson, 31, in a domestic violence incident in Baton Rouge. He was booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison on charges of second-degree murder and illegal use of a weapon.
According to a report from People magazine, Richardson’s child told police that she had been asleep in the car with her mother and Bryant when she heard “a loud bang.”
Bryant was questioned by police, and he told the authorities he had argued with Richardson but was not involved in her disappearance. Her body was found along the bank of the Mississippi River in St. James Parish on Thursday, about 40 miles south of Baton Rouge, discovered by a group of children.
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The U.S. Congress recently voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, but experts say that killings and assaults of women remain a pervasive issue.
“It’s definitely a public health concern of pandemic proportions that we have failed to address systematically,” said Kalliopi Mingeirou, chief of the Ending Violence Against Women initiative at UN Women, according to NBC News. “We’re seeing it happening across all countries, across all classes. Violence against women and girls doesn’t happen in isolation. It is systemic.”
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According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, one in three women will be the victim of intimate partner violence in her lifetime. A new report from the organization notes that on a typical day, more than 20,000 phone calls are placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide.
Historically, more than 40 percent of Black women will experience some form of domestic violence in their lifetime. Even more disturbingly, Black women are more than 2.5 times as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by an intimate partner.
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