[Trigger warning on this post] This horrible story greeted me this morning when I got to work and made the internet rounds. A man killed his 9-month-old son and himself this Sunday, leaving behind “dozens of angry, desperate messages to the boy’s mother, including a lengthy suicide note and a memorial collage that appeared on the Web hours after he was dead.” The messages he had repeatedly been sending his wife online and via text message are incredibly disturbing, and include threats against the life of their son and admitted to physically abusing her. So one would think that with such a clear history of mental instability and abuse, there would have been a legal intervention before 25 year-old Stephen Garcia actually killed his child.

But tragically, despite the best efforts of Garcia’s ex-girlfriend (the mother of his child) and her family, the law did nothing to stop Garcia from acting on his clearly escalating unstable behavior. From the local paper in Yucca Valley, California:

Her family said Garcia abused [Katie] Tagle throughout their two-year relationship, which ended in August 2009, when, her family said, he punched her in the face, knocking her unconscious…

On Dec. 15, Tagle asked for an emergency restraining order against Garcia, telling Judge Debra Harris in a Joshua Tree courtroom that Garcia had threatened Wyatt. “He had sent me text messages before that if his son was around certain people … that he would kill him,” Tagle told the judge, according to transcripts of the hearing. “And that if I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, he’d find me and kill me.”

“What about the threat to shoot you, where did that occur, to hunt you down and shoot you with a gun?” the judge asked. “That was in a text message, Tagle replied. When Harris asked for copies of the text messages, Tagle said she had no way of printing them out and her phone was shut off. The judge denied the emergency order and set a hearing.

At that hearing, on Jan. 12, Tagle went before Judge David Mazurek in the Joshua Tree courthouse to show cause for a restraining order. “…On Dec. 31, we were doing our exchange, and he proposed to me, and I said no. He got angry and stole my phone and pushed me down. I made a police report about that,” Tagle told the judge, according to a transcript.

Garcia told the judge the report was “falsely made up.” Mazurek denied Tagle the restraining order. “If I grant the restraining order, how do you think that’s going to help with respect to you two being able to raise Wyatt together or work together to make sure Wyatt grows up happy and healthy?” the judge asked, according to the transcripts.

Asked about an e-mail in which he confessed to hitting Tagle, Garcia told the judge he had slapped her during a fight, but it was Tagle’s fault for “pushing and pushing and pushing until she could get something from me.” Tagle pointed out she was nine months pregnant when Garcia hit her. “I kind of get an idea of what’s going on,” Mazurek said. He denied the restraining order, saying, “I don’t think that Mr. Garcia poses a threat to Ms. Tagle.” Mazurek went on to suggest Tagle might have ulterior motives for alleging domestic violence. “I get concerned when there’s a pending child custody and visitation issue and in between that, one party or the other claims that there’s some violence in between. It raises the court’s eyebrows because based on my experience, it’s a way for one party to try to gain an advantage over the other,” he said, according to the transcripts.

This judge’s ruling…rulings, plural, actually, are despicable. Not only does there appear to be clear evidence that Garcia was abusive, but Mazurek had the audacity to imply that Tagle should basically suck it up and make ammends with her abusive ex to make sure their son “grows up happy and healthy.” What a terribly, terribly sad turn of phrase in context.

That he goes on to suggest that she is making up the abuse in order to have the upper-hand in a custody battle is even more horrible—not only in hindsight, but consider that Garcia had already made threats against his son’s life. I can’t help but think of the survivors of sexual assault who are accused of falsey reporting to get revenge. It’s not that people never lie, or never manipulate the system, but it seems that we still live in a culture where the impulse is sometimes to believe that the victim is lying, and letting that color the perception of the hard evidence. And sometimes, when that happens, innocent people are harmed and killed. As Katie Tagle’s mother said, “This was preventable. This didn’t have to happen.”