Your comments are well reasoned. However, I will not grant you that the very thing that we are considering is a "given" . That is "if the threat was real, which we now know it was". We do not know that, though I concede that it is plausible. My point was that the threat might have been engendered by her action to get the restraining order. She knew that the restraining order would destroy his career. She had not gotten it for months during the divorce proceedings. He contended that she was lying.
It was only after she got the restraining order that he committed the crime.
There are many, perhaps more than half, recently, cases where abuse is alledged in order to win advantage in divorce courts. It has become so common that attorneys that I know tell of how many (attorneys) lead clients into its use as a weapon against the other spouse, even if it is not true.
Certainly it is true that people under great stress, who feel as if their life has been destroyed unjustly, sometime act out in destructive ways against the people they think have wronged them.
I am only suggesting the possibility that this officer felt that he was in a situation in which he could never find justice, and in the stress of the moment, felt such dispair at loosing all that he had worked his entire life for, committed the horrid act out of a desperate sense of anger, pain, and retribution.
I am not saying this was the correct choice. I am just saying that the woman's power, given to her by the Lautenberg amendment, may have contributed to the tragedy. If the Lautenberg amendment were not in place, it seems unlikely that the murder suicide would have happened, because the restraining order would not have meant the certain destruction of the officers carreer.
There is a tremendous imbalance in the law here, where an officer can have his entire carreer destroyed on a simple "he said, she said" issue.
But then again it was only after she broke that restraining order that he committed the crime. Lots of men have had restraining orders put on them ---for less reason and they got mad but didn't do anything to make things worse. I know people whose kids told teachers they were being abused ----just because the kid was mad about some discipline they received, one case I know where the kid actually called 911 just to show the parents. The parents weren't happy about having police and/or social workers start interfering nor the possible effect on their careers but they didn't shoot their kids.
Anyhow in this case he's dead but if he wasn't, he'd deserve that same fate.
Granted. I don't know if good advice to either of them could have saved them.
Her allegations making the papers, and possibly the eventual effect they would have on his career, certainly look likely to be the fuse that set him off. I just don't know how to prevent people from "going off" by not using the court system we have to enforce crimes against us.... If you know he is a loose cannon that will freak if his position is threatened, then her position is impossible too, she either lives under that threat and the abuse of power that comes from it, or she creates the villain she fears by reporting it. It is a mess.