How Many Warning Signs Does It Take to Save a Mother’s Life?

Darlene Snowden keeps asking herself the same question, the one that rips through her sleepless nights and stalks her through grocery store aisles and quiet moments with her grandchildren: How many times does a woman have to cry for help before the world stops waiting for the punch?

Her daughter Shantal, 34, never got hit. That’s what made it so easy for everyone—the courts, the mutual friends, perhaps even Shantal herself—to minimize the danger. The ex-boyfriend, father of two of her three children, was just “volatile.” “Intense.” “Had a temper.” These linguistic contortions we perform to avoid naming evil for what it is.

Now three children under the age of seven wake up screaming, and Darlene has to explain why Mommy isn’t coming home from heaven.

The dictionary defines it as “not able to be predicted.” But in the context of abusive relationships, it’s a code word for terrorism.

“He never hit her,” Darlene told reporters, her voice carrying the hollow tone of someone who knows that sentence is both true and catastrophically irrelevant. “But it was always an explosion of anger. Just verbally. The type of person you could never calm down if he got upset.”

Shantal lived with that unpredictability for years. The walking-on-eggshells existence where a wrong word, a wrong look, a child’s spilled juice could detonate a verbal warzone. She documented these episodes. She told people. She followed the “proper channels” when she finally left him eighteen months ago, marrying a man Darlene describes as “wonderful”—someone who treated all three children as his own.

The system gave her a piece of paper and a court-ordered custody schedule. The system gave him access.

December 26th, post-noon, Upper Darby intersection of Locust Street and Copley Road. A location so mundane it could be anywhere. Shantal sat in the driver’s seat of her car, her three children—ages 1, 4, and 6—buckled safely behind her.

The 45-year-old ex approached. This was the dance they did. The shuffling of children between homes, the performative civility for the sake of “coparenting.”

He got into the passenger seat. Argued. Drew a gun. Shot Shantal point-blank while her babies watched. Then shot himself.

The entire transaction took minutes. The trauma will last generations.

A neighbor, hearing the gunfire, rushed toward the vehicle. Risked their life. Pulled three screaming children from the backseat mere moments after witnessing their mother’s murder.

“I want to thank that person,” Darlene sobbed. “Because it could have been them. In his state of mind, he did not care.”

The children were physically unharmed. That phrase appears in police reports—a bureaucratic blessing that means nothing. Their minds, their sense of safety, their understanding of love? Those took direct hits.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Shantal’s ex never needed to hit her to be lethal. The gun made sure of that, but the psychological warfare had already done the damage. We, as a society, have a violence hierarchy that privileges the visible. Bruises trump terror. Broken bones override broken spirits.

Shantal’s pattern of abuse included:

But because he never “hit her,” the danger remained invisible to those with the power to intervene. How many risk assessments must a woman pass before she’s believed? How many times does she need to articulate her fear before it’s deemed legitimate?

Right now, Darlene is raising three children who believe monsters are real because they’ve seen one. The 6-year-old asks logistical questions about heaven’s communication system. The 4-year-old wakes up with night terrors that have no name. The 1-year-old searches every room for a face that will never appear again.

“They wake up at night and they are crying. They’re screaming,” Darlene said. “And I have to hold them and tell them everything is all right. That their mom is in heaven. And they ask when can they talk to her and I say, ‘We will talk to her when we pray.'”

The ex-boyfriend died after being taken off life support on Monday. A final loss that feels, to Darlene, like a sentence unfinished. There will be no trial. No answers. No moment where he explains how a custody dispute becomes a capital crime.

Just silence. And three children who will never not know that silence means Mommy isn’t coming back.

The hashtag #WhyIStayed once trended as survivors explained the complex calculus of leaving abusive partners. Perhaps we need a new one: #WhyWouldntSheBeBelieved.

Shantal did everything “right.” She left. She remarried. She built a stable life. She facilitated court-ordered visitation. She documented his behavior. She lived in fear but functioned with courage.

And she died anyway—executed in front of her children because the system that enabled her abuse couldn’t imagine it would turn lethal.

So we’re left with Darlene’s question, echoing through empty bedrooms and therapy sessions and courtrooms nationwide: How many warning signs does it take?

The answer, for Shantal Snowden, was never enough.