09/15/2024
TW. Self defese. Domestic Violence. Murder. "This was the case with Shajia Ayobi, who was married for 18 years to Ghulam Ayobi. He was a prisoner of war during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and emerged from that conflict with post-traumatic stress disorder. The couple made their way to Sacramento, where over the years, she said, he grew increasingly erratic and demanded to know her whereabouts at every moment. He’d call, and if she didn’t pick up the phone right away, he’d attack her later. He stalked her at her job. Once, when he came home and found their 14-year-old son, Masiula, playing games on a computer, he retrieved an ax from the garage and attacked the computer, smashing it to bits. While his sisters escaped upstairs and called family friends for help, Masiula said, his dad turned toward him with the ax. Then the friends arrived, and Mr. Ayobi stopped. At one point, Ms. Ayobi escaped to Canada with her children, but after a month Mr. Ayobi brought them back to California, warning her that he would kill the children if she ever tried to flee again.
Ms. Ayobi thought about getting a gun for her protection, but she despaired over being able to use it in a moment of terror, or worse, her husband finding it and using it against the rest of the family. She told me the night her husband died, she was terrified of him not because he’d attacked her but because he’d been so eerily quiet. The couple’s four children were all teens or preteens by the time Mr. Ayobi died, and three of them spoke to me, independently, about how terrified they were of their father and how utterly sure they were that by killing their father, their mother had saved their lives.
But Ms. Ayobi, like Ms. Ford, did not kill her husband herself. Ms. Ayobi, in desperation, offered a classmate $10,000 to kill him just days before his death, in 2011. In both the Ford and Ayobi cases, the women were portrayed as the driving forces behind a sinister plan. Their actions were interpreted not as those of spouses terrified and unable to kill the abuser themselves but as partners so deceptive and manipulative that they masterminded the crime and talked others into joining the scheme. And certainly, a woman who has time to recruit someone to kill her husband for her is not a woman most courts will see as in imminent danger."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/04/opinion/women-kill-self-defense.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K04.Ms2u.t8lzYhk0CSqp&smid=url-share
