A rash of murder-suicides tore through Nebraska last year, leaving 25 people dead.

Most of the victims were women and girls killed by their current or former boyfriends, fiancés or husbands.

The trend coincides with a federal funding shortfall for domestic violence service organizations. In Nebraska, state attempts to fill that gap have failed.

A tragic case

Jaliyah Compton, living in Pawnee City at the time, listened as the judge read her petition for a protection order against her then-boyfriend into the record.

Started to choke me on the bed. Adam [Lewis] says he blacked out and lost control.

The judge asked if the allegations were true. She nodded.

I attempted to escape, which resulted in him rushing and slamming the door with my arms between it. I have bruises.

For years, those who loved Jaliyah saw red flags in her relationship with Adam. The pair met online while Jaliyah was still in high school and Adam, about three years her senior, lived a few states away. Jaliyah’s mother, Joyce, forbade her from visiting Adam until she was 18 years old.

Upon reaching adulthood, Jaliyah packed up her life and moved to Michigan. She and Adam lived in a rent-to-own trailer until Jaliyah became pregnant in 2022 and, needing support from family, the couple moved back to Jaliyah’s home state. They settled into a small apartment in Pawnee City, a rural enclave near the Kansas border.

Jaliyah became increasingly isolated after moving back to Nebraska. Her friendships faltered. She drifted apart from her sister, Jennifer Hill. She started jobs and quit when Adam took issue with the uniform, the clientele or the time she spent away from home.

“I saw through this stuff, because I was in an abusive relationship for like seven years,” Jennifer said as she sat at the family’s kitchen table in Tecumseh. “I saw right through it.”

Tensions escalated in the summer. During an argument about social media on June 30, Jaliyah wrote in her protection order petition, Adam pinned her down to the bed and choked her.

A week later, she said, he slammed a door on her arm. After the second occurrence, Joyce took Jaliyah to the Pawnee County Sheriff’s Office to make a report. It was there, on July 14, that she filed for a domestic abuse protection order against Adam, which was granted pending a hearing.

Days later, Adam filed his own petition against Jaliyah alleging she had neglected their son.

Both appeared in court on July 21. Adam spoke for much of the 25-minute hearing.

I was never on top of her. I don’t put my hands on females whatsoever. I’m not that type of person. I don’t want nothing else with her. She’s caused me enough trouble in my life.

Both protection orders were denied. Joyce picked up Jaliyah from the Pawnee County courthouse as it poured rain. She was “sitting down with her back up against a pole just bawling and shaking so bad,” Joyce said.

Even without the protection order, the two separated. Adam returned to the apartment in Pawnee City, and Jaliyah briefly moved back to Tecumseh with her family.

The two attempted to share custody of their then 3-year-old son without involving the courts. In early August, Jaliyah and her son moved in with a friend in Falls City. Adam often found excuses to visit the friend’s home. But by mid-August, Joyce said, he was no longer allowed on the property.

On the morning of Aug. 20, a friend of the homeowner walked into the little home on Lane Street. She found Jaliyah dead on the couch; Adam on the floor. Both had been shot in the head, according to police reports from Falls City. A small handgun was found underneath Adam’s left leg.

By the way the scene looked in photos, Joyce said, Jaliyah hadn’t had time to react.

Murder-suicide spikes in Nebraska

Last year in Nebraska, the majority of all female homicide victims were killed in murder-suicides.

Twelve murder-suicides – including one in which the alleged perpetrator shot himself in the head and survived and another in which a man killed his wife and two children before killing himself — left a total of 25 people dead.

A Nebraska Public Media review of such cases identified 30 murder-suicides in Nebraska between 2019 and 2025 that killed a combined 62 people.

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Victims ranged in age from 14 to 86. They were White, Black, Hispanic and Asian. They lived in Nebraska’s urban centers and small towns across the state. Some perpetrators had extensive histories of domestic violence or mental illness. Most had none.

The only characteristic common among the perpetrators was gender: All were male. At the national level, too, murder-suicide is a crime almost always committed by men. Researchers consistently find that more than 90 percent of murder-suicide perpetrators are male and about 70 percent of victims are female.

Most murder-suicides in Nebraska involve a woman killed by her current or former intimate partner. The handful that do not fall into that category typically occur between family members. Of the 33 victims in those 30 reviewed murder-suicide cases between 2019 and 2025, 27 were women killed by a current or former boyfriend, husband or fiancé.

For organizations that serve victims of domestic violence, the increasing prevalence of murder-suicide is startling. Christon MacTaggert, the executive director of the Nebraska Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, said organizations are seeing more instances of severe violence resulting in serious injury.

“It is a complex but perhaps perfect storm of things that have me highly concerned about increases in lethality we’re seeing just in general across the state, whether or not those cases end in a death,” MacTaggert said.

Federal funds erode as need increases

Federal funding for domestic violence programs has been steadily decreasing for years, and Nebraska’s ability to make up for the shortfall is challenged by a hole in the state budget.

A sizable chunk of federal funding for domestic violence services comes from the federal Justice Department. One major grant program is the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, which includes competitive grants and formula grants that allocate money to each state based on population.

Emily Schoenleber, VAWA grant administrator at the Nebraska Crime Commission, said the state typically receives about $1.2 million to $1.4 million annually through the STOP program, a discretionary grant program that funds legal services, prosecutors, courts and law enforcement.

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On top of that, Nebraska regularly receives about $5 million to $7 million annually in federal grants, Schoenleber said. That money is then distributed amongst the 24 organizations that provide direct services to domestic violence survivors across Nebraska.

Historically, another significant source of federal funding for domestic violence services came from the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA. While VAWA funding is appropriated by Congress, VOCA is a unique program funded by criminal fines, bail bonds, penalties and special assessments from federal prosecutions.

Because of an increase in deferred and non-prosecution agreements, the funds available through VOCA have dwindled over the past decade. As a result, Nebraska’s VOCA funding has decreased from nearly $20 million in 2018 to less than $5 million in 2024, according to data from the federal Office for Crime Victims.

“That funding is kind of a backbone for so many of our agencies,” Hilary Wasserburger said of VOCA funds. She leads the DOVES program, which is the sole organization serving domestic violence survivors in nine counties across the Nebraska Panhandle.

Advocates say there is little hope VOCA funding will bounce back to previous levels. That leaves organizations scrambling to fill multi-million dollar funding gaps as need increases.

“It’s not like this is just a little glitch in the system,” Wasserburger said. “I think these lower levels of VOCA funding are going to continue, and it just makes everything harder.”

“We don’t expect it will ever get back to the levels that it once was,” MacTaggert said.

Changing requirements for federal grants have also frustrated domestic violence service organizations. Wasserburger said DOVES was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department for Housing and Development to operate seven transitional housing units where survivors can live for three months to a year as they get back on their feet. DOVES does not have a shelter. It instead relies on hotel vouchers, which Wasserburger said are “very short term.”

“Originally last year, they granted funding for two years – and now the administration has pulled that back and are making people reapply on a very tight timeline with pretty big programmatic changes, moving away from rental assistance and instead saying that we need to provide transitional housing,” Wasserburger said. “That’s infrastructure that needs time to be built up.”

State funding attempts fail – twice

Nebraska has attempted twice in recent years to funnel millions in state money to domestic violence service organizations. Both attempts failed. And prospects for a new solution are scarce as Nebraska faces a budget shortfall heading into the Legislative session.

“With the budget shortfall that they are going to have to contend with this session, it is unlikely that they are going to give us this money from the state general fund,” MacTaggert said. “We have had broad support, and at the same time, we’re fighting 30 months now to get access to [funds].”

In 2023, the Legislature appropriated $6 million over two years in additional funds for domestic violence service organizations. The money came from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program. Nebraska receives about $56 million annually in federal TANF funds, and any unspent money is carried over into a rainy day fund. That money can then be appropriated for a variety of programs, including domestic violence services.

The TANF money never reached survivors or providers due to conflicts between reporting requirements and confidentiality practices. MacTaggert said she and others worked with state and federal officials for years to try to find a solution before determining there could be no workaround.

In the 2025 session, the Legislature again attempted to funnel a total of $6 million to domestic violence services over the next two fiscal years. This time, the money would come from the state Medicaid Managed Care Excess Profit Fund.

But that fund was overallocated. In a fiscal note submitted to the Legislature in March, a legislative fiscal analyst noted that the “source of funding indicated in the bill cannot sustain the additional expenditure.”

As of late December, MacTaggert said none of the money has reached organizations in the coalition. She said it’s been difficult to get any information about the status of the funds.

“All we have really been told – and, again, this is not from anybody that is really involved with the fund, it’s just information passed through – is that we should not count on the money,” MacTaggert said.

“It just feels like the timing couldn’t be worse,” she said.

The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services was given more than a week to answer questions for this story. It did not respond by publication.

In Omaha and other large metropolitan areas, organizations can fall back on the city’s large network of philanthropic donors and family foundations to fill the gaps left by decreasing federal funds. But Katie Welsh, the vice president of programs at the Women’s Center for Advancement in Omaha, worries for smaller organizations in rural areas that don’t have the same support.

“I worry about what will happen with these rates [of domestic violence] if some of these service providers can’t keep their doors open,” Welsh said. “Or if they can keep their doors open, will they have to limit the services that they’re offering? Or the number of staff that’s available to somebody who needs help?”

The protection order question Jaliyah’s family is still somewhat split on whether an active protection order could have prevented the murder-suicide. But family members contacted for this story contend that lifting it was a mistake.

“What would it have hurt to grant her the protection order to err on the side of caution?” Jaliyah’s aunt, Amber McElroy, said. “I know a lot of people were saying it’s just a piece of paper, but at least it would have empowered her to feel like she could call the cops.”

Her killing – and those of other Nebraska women who were granted protection orders against the men who would later kill them – led to renewed questions about the efficacy of protection orders in Nebraska.

Welsh said her main concern about protection orders is the limited ability of police to remove firearms from potentially dangerous people.

“The petitioner can ask for the respondent to not have access to a firearm, but police are not going to necessarily walk into that person’s house who has the protection order against them and just take their weapons from them – or that’s not the case every time,” she said. “It may prevent them from buying one that they don’t have, but the guns that are in their possession – while it is a violation of that court order, enforcement is very difficult.”

When a person files for a domestic abuse protection order, they can request that a judge prohibits their alleged abuser from “possessing or purchasing a firearm.” It is then up to a judge to order that prohibition as part of the order if they deem it necessary.

Once granted by a judge, the protection order is served upon the respondent by members of a county sheriff’s office. But policies on how to handle the firearm prohibition when serving protection orders differ significantly between departments. In many cases, the responsibility falls to the respondent to comply voluntarily.

“It is the respondent’s responsibility to comply fully with all conditions of the court-issued protection order,” said Kelsey Cruz, a spokesperson for the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office. “If LSO receives information – within our jurisdiction – indicating that a respondent is unlawfully possessing firearms in violation of a protection order, deputies cannot enter the residence solely based on that suspicion. Instead, deputies may investigate the report and attempt to enter the residence through consent. If consent is denied, deputies can prepare an affidavit for a search warrant.”

The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, similarly, does not take possession of weapons after serving protection orders. Seward County Sheriff’s Office Road Patrol Captain Bradley Melby said the department’s approach differs based on the circumstances and the specificity of a judge’s order.

“We can ask for the weapons, and if the subject is cooperative, we can take those weapons into our possession,” Melby said in an email. “If the judge has specifically ordered us to remove the weapons, or are subject to seizure under Nebraska law, we can then take those into our possession.”

Twenty-two states have laws on the books to enforce Extreme Risk Protection Orders, or ERPOs. Colloquially called “red flag laws,” provisions vary by state but typically allow law enforcement to search for and seize firearms after allowing the respondent time to voluntarily relinquish them.

They are reserved for cases in which a person is deemed to be at an immediate risk of harming themselves or someone else.

The last time Nebraska legislators attempted to pass a similar law was in 2020. The bill, brought to the Legislature in both 2019 and 2020, was supported by the Nebraska chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police and police departments in Omaha and Lincoln.

The Nebraska Association of County Sheriffs took a neutral stance, citing concerns about gun storage and liability – but the association’s president said at a judiciary committee hearing in 2019 that he looked forward to “getting this bill passed.”

Defense attorneys and gun rights groups have consistently opposed ERPOs in Nebraska and elsewhere. The proposals never got off the ground. No similar attempt has been made in the last five legislative sessions.

Some have argued a person’s gun rights should not be infringed based on allegations.

The ‘ex’ factor

Large-scale studies of murder-suicides in the U.S. identify current or former romantic partners as the most likely perpetrators – but, because of the small sample size and limited information, they rarely differentiate between current and former partners.

In Nebraska, at least half of the women killed in murder-suicides in 2025 were killed by a former intimate partner from whom they had already separated. Those only include cases in which publicly available court filings provide insight into the circumstances of the relationship.

In addition to Jaliyah, there was Michelle Gonzalez, who was tracked down and shot to death on a busy Lincoln street within hours of filing a protection order against her ex-boyfriend.

There was Jamie Hagen, who wrote in a protection order petition that her ex-boyfriend, Casey Kindt, threatened to “kill me and then put a bullet in his head.” Within a day of Kindt’s release from jail after violating the protection order, he allegedly broke down the door to Hagen’s home and shot her to death before placing the gun underneath his chin and pulling the trigger.

The bullet tore through his skull and came to rest in his brain, but Kindt survived, and he is awaiting trial for first-degree murder.

There was 17-year-old Zara “A.J.” Sobanksy, who had just finished her sophomore year of high school when she was gunned down by her ex-boyfriend outside of an Omaha restaurant in June. Court records allege that the pair broke up about a month prior to the murder-suicide.

And there was Heather Gray, who filed for divorce from her husband in Clay County on Feb. 20. He killed them both on Feb. 21, with their three young children in the home.

“Particularly when a victim has left the relationship or is trying to leave the relationship, that sort of final act of control is sometimes to kill the victim,” MacTaggert said. “And then the step after that is that sometimes perpetrators will kill themselves.

“I don’t know if I can speak to what drives that other than, again, that control and power over the relationship, and perhaps not wanting to be accountable for what comes after.”

That tracks with what Welsh says she has seen in research specific to Douglas County. A study commissioned by the Women’s Fund of Omaha last year found that former partners are now the most common type of victim-offender relationship in intimate partner violence incidents reported to the Omaha Police Department. Former dating partners went from 27.6 percent of reported incidents in 2015 to 41.9 percent in 2024.

“I think that trend can be chalked up to different things,” Welsh said of the increase. “Intimate partners who used to be in a relationship often have to interact a lot, even after their relationship is over. Maybe they have children together, or they’re kind of trying to untangle their lives. So if they’re put in contact, and the abuser is likely still trying to exercise power and control over the victim, then we’re going to see 911 calls occur and those domestic violence incidents occur.”

The aftermath

The aftermath of murder-suicides creates a complex web of grief. It is a crime without legal consequence. For the victim’s families, there can never be justice. For the families of those who perpetrate murder-suicides, there are no answers. There is no why.

Perhaps no one suffers more than the young children left behind, who are taken in by relatives in the best of cases and the subject of drawn-out, contentious custody battles in the worst.

Many children witness the murder-suicide or the arguments that precede it. Or, like Jaliyah and Adam’s son, they come home to a world without their parents. Jackson Hill, Jaliyah’s 12-year-old nephew, said the boy sometimes sits in the living room and says: Mom, mom, mom.

It was Hagen’s teenage daughter who called police after Kindt broke down their door. Evita Gove, killed in 2019, fled to a neighbor’s house with her six-year-old daughter when her husband caught up to them and shot her multiple times, leaving the girl unscathed, and then killed himself during a police standoff.

When Bu Gay was shot to death by her boyfriend in Lincoln last year, he also shot her 13-year-old son, who survived.

The families of the perpetrators often struggle privately to square their love for the person they knew with the devastation of their final act. In many cases, the perpetrator’s family is the victim’s family, too. Joyce and the rest of the Compton family now face the impossible task of deciding how to talk to Jaliyah’s son about his father.

“We don’t want it to be a bash session on Adam, because someday, [their son] is going to look this up,” Amber, Jaliyah’s aunt, said. “Kids get their sense of self from their parents, to an extent. And it doesn’t need to be, ‘Well, my dad was bad, so I’m bad, right?’”

Haunted by the past

Jackson sometimes thinks his aunt might be haunting their house. The two became close during the few weeks Jaliyah spent at the home in Tecumseh before she moved in with her friend in Falls City.

They watched wrestling, and Jaliyah taught him to crochet.

Now, he says he hears footsteps coming from the bedroom where she stayed. A song by Cardi B, one of Jaliyah’s favorite artists, pops up on the TV without anyone searching for it.

Jackson, who is determined to be an attorney so that “nobody has to go through what Jaliyah did ever again,” began to cry as he recounted the chaos that unfolded when the family found out Jaliyah had been killed.

“I was hoping that she was going to come back and help me crochet a blanket,” Jackson said, weeping. “But she never did.”