What Nicole McChriston’s killing can teach Dallas about responding to domestic violence

Every domestic violence murder is maddening — or it should be — because we can almost always spot this tragedy rumbling in the distance toward its victim.

That was the trajectory of Nicole Marie McChriston’s last year of life and her hideous, but little-noticed, killing Sept. 4 in her mother’s northeast Dallas apartment.

The writing was on the wall, yet the criminal justice system, and the community as a whole, forgot to read it.

Five police reports over nine months allege a string of escalating violence that Jerry Ford — a man Nicole first loved and then feared — perpetuated against her.

The DPD incident narratives tell us this: In February, he shoved her and left with her phone. A month later, he punched her in the face and head, knocking her to the ground. In June, he hit her hard with his clenched fist outside the home the 40-year-old shared with her mother, Debra McDonald.

He wildly swung a machete — a weapon that could take off her head — in Nicole’s face on July 26, according to the lengthy police report taken that day. As Debra tended to cuts across her daughter’s body, Ford fled.

Only later would the mother deal with her own bruises, sustained when Ford knocked her to the ground to get at Nicole.

After police caught him the next day, this time Ford went to jail on aggravated assault charges. But just after he was able to bond out in early September — at a cost of only $2,500 — Nicole was dead and Ford was charged with her murder.

Ford’s attorney, Don Guidry, has not returned my call and or responded to my email regarding the murder charge and the police reports on the incidents that proceeded it.

Family violence homicides in Dallas — though a few less than this time last year — are still high: The 28 killings account for about 15% of 2020′s 189 homicides. Aggravated assaults related to family violence — up 8.6% over 2019 — account for 25 percent of that crime category.

The city’s Domestic Violence Task Force, led since 2013 by council member Jennifer Staubach Gates, released its 2020 recommendations Monday. Along with the evergreen need for more shelter beds, calls to action include better training for police officers and changes to allow bond-setting magistrates to know more about the accused.

We will never get every domestic violence case right, but I am increasingly convinced that we are better-served to focus on improved training and more resources, not more processes and paperwork. As arduous as this issue is, Nicole’s story illustrates why we can’t stop trying.

Nicole’s mother told me that her daughter dealt with bipolar disorder and other strains of mental illness for many years. That left Nicole unable to hold a job for more than a month or two, so she continued to live with her mother.

The Chicago natives moved to Florida in 2002 and then to Dallas about six years ago.

McDonald, 63, faces her own physical health challenges, which make it difficult for her to get around, and Nicole was always a big help.

Nicole met the 58-year-old Ford late last year through a mutual friend and “he took advantage of her because he knew her mental struggles,” Debra said. “She had a mental age of 16 or 18 years old. She was basically still a teenager.”

Debra didn’t like Ford coming around their apartment and repeatedly urged her daughter “to get rid of him.” But anything he told Nicole — including that he loved her — she believed.

Eventually he began threatening her, despite her following his every order, Debra said. “He even said he was going to hurt me.” The multiple incident reports from Dallas police say the same.

Officers responded to the February and March incidents issued misdemeanor citations against Ford and provided Nicole information about local advocacy groups. They asked her to fill out “lethality assessment” questionnaires; her responses on the two I reviewed were almost identical:

Nicole said Ford previously had threatened to kill her, sometimes with a weapon. He had been “violently and constantly jealous and controlling” and “followed and spied” on her.

But for too long Nicole was caught in the same cycle that traps so many other victims: She believed in Ford’s ability to hurt her more than in the system’s ability to protect her.

Debra told me that, after the July 26 incident, officers finally persuaded Nicole that moving into a shelter was “the only way we can protect you,” But, according to Debra, “she called every single one of them but could not find a spot.”

After Ford was apprehended on the aggravated assault charge, his bond was set at $35,000 but eventually dropped to $25,000, meaning he would eventually be able to get out for $2,500.

Before his release, Debra said, he called Nicole “all the time, threatening her because she had put him in jail.” She urged her daughter to leave town, but Nicole refused because, according to Debra, “she was afraid he would hurt me.”

Amid the uncertainty, Debra wound up in the hospital. She was eager to get back to Nicole so her sister drove her directly to the apartment as soon as she was released Sept. 4.

They pulled up and “there was all the police and it had just happened. It was just horrific.” This time, Debra said, Ford had come after Nicole with a hunting knife.

Police say Ford called 911 from the apartment to report that he had killed someone then sped off in Nicole’s car. After wrecking out in the front yard of a Mesquite home during the subsequent chase, he was shot by converging officers.

Mesquite police told WFAA (Channel 8) that when searching the crash scene, they found a large chrome-bladed hunting-style knife by the car Ford was driving.

He was hospitalized with gunshot wounds to the legs and transferred several days later to the county jail, where his bond is set at $500,000.

Nicole’s mother is a strong woman. It was clear that sharing her story was difficult, but her voice cracked only once — when she told me, “I just have so much trouble with a person taking advantage of someone with a mental illness.”

In Nicole’s obituary, the family asked for memorials to go to Genesis Women’s Shelter. “We felt that no future person should be denied such assistance, and any donations would allow them to help more women,” Debra told me.

As she waits for developments in her daughter’s case, Debra finds herself repeatedly coming back to her belief that Ford shouldn’t have been released after the July machete attack. “I just don’t understand his bond going down and being so low.”

But magistrates in Dallas make big decisions without a lot of information. They strictly follow bond schedules and are under the pressure of both large jail populations during a pandemic and a lawsuit on the county’s bail-setting practices.

It’s an around-the-clock administrative churn-a-thon, not an informative hearing in which parties are advocating on either side. Often a victim’s best option is to ask the magistrate for an emergency protective order.

Realities like these are why task force leader Gates and advocates such as Jan Langbein and Paige Flink are determined to leave no stone unturned in trying to improve the system for victims of domestic violence.

Privacy regulations prohibit shelters from confirming whether Nicole reached out to local shelters. But Flink pointed to the task force’s finding that more shelter beds are needed, especially for single women.

Flink also is eager to meet with the magistrates and others in the criminal justice system to do everything legally possible to make sure “lethal abusers are given higher bonds, that warrants are served as swiftly as possible, and that sentences are commensurate with crimes committed.”

Langbein, CEO of Genesis Women’s Shelter, told me that no matter how many changes are made to the system, domestic violence can’t be left at the steps of shelters, police departments or courthouses.

“The reality is that there will always be a shortage of safe beds,” Langbein said. That’s why Genesis is building a new nonresidential outreach center to assist women and children in abusive situations before a crisis point.

It’s troubling to those of us who have been advocated about domestic violence for years that so many citizens discount this violence as the result of bad choices or crimes that don’t affect the rest of the neighborhood.

As Langbein said, we need a societal paradigm shift to change the conversation from “why does a victim stay” to “why does someone commit domestic violence in the first place.”

Putting more burdensome rules and processes into the criminal justice maze isn’t the answer. Instead, let’s make sure that every decision-maker in that labyrinth has sufficient time and skills to pay special attention to the really scary offenders.

A guy wielding a machete seems like a pretty obvious red flag.