Domestic terrors

THE CHILDREN sobbed while they watched.

The shouting had given way to the sickening sound of fury meeting flesh as their father started beating their mother, wrapping his hands around her neck, the terror spilling from one room of their North Philly home to another on March 31, 2012.

Ricardo Gonzalez, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer, ended up on top of his wife, hissing threats, promising to kill her and stuff her body into a trash bag, according to court records.

To calm the couple's four hysterical children, he yelled: "Stop crying! Daddy is only playing with Mommy!"

Gonzalez had previously threatened to kill his wife and their kids if she ever left.

This time, he added a soul-crushing taunt. Go ahead and call 9-1-1, Gonzalez told his wife.

"The cops are not going to do anything," he said.

He was wrong. Gonzalez was arrested two months after the terrifying assault and booted from the force. He was found guilty of simple assault earlier this summer and faces sentencing on Sept. 26.

Unfortunately, the scene that played out in Gonzalez's home wasn't an isolated horror story.

National studies show that 40 percent of police families experience domestic violence, compared with about 10 percent of the general public.

It is a silent epidemic, its victims often trapped in the shadows of their own homes, lost in a debilitating mix of fear, confusion, anxiety and doubt.

The Daily News asked the Philadelphia Police Department for statistics on officer-involved domestic disputes after being contacted by wives and girlfriends of Philly cops who claimed they suffered in silence for years - but also still felt too vulnerable to speak on the record.

The department's data show that 164 officers have had domestic-abuse complaints filed against them in the past five years.

Of that lot, 11 cops were fired and criminally charged, and only three have been successfully prosecuted. Most got back their old jobs.

The numbers suggest that the problem is small, but domestic-violence experts say the issue is bigger than what the stats show.

"That [figure] seems incredibly low to me, although not terribly surprising in that domestic-violence incidents are vastly underreported," said Debasri Ghosh, director of education and communications at Women's Way, which advocates for women and funds projects to help them.

Women battered by men with a badge are even less likely to report their abuse, Ghosh said.

Some worry that their complaints will be covered up by their spouse's colleagues, or have ruinous financial repercussions, like the loss of their spouse's salary and benefits.

Others fear that filing a complaint could lead their significant other to completely snap, and fulfill the darkest of their threats.

Rosaura Torres suffered in silence for years.

The Northeast Philadelphia woman, 54, was married to a Philadelphia police officer who eventually ascended into the top ranks of the department. He beat, kicked and choked her for 16 years until one especially brutal beating left her with a detached retina that left her partially blind.

Throughout, she begged him to stop and threatened to report him.

"He made it very clear that no one would listen to me because of his position in the community," Torres said. "He said: 'No one's going to listen to you. They'll all say you're crazy.' And he was right."

She wrote a letter to city and police officials in 2001 to protest his promotion, citing his history of domestic abuse. He was promoted anyway.

The couple divorced in 2004.

The Daily News is not naming her ex-husband, who has since retired in Philadelphia and now works outside the city, because he was never criminally charged.

Since then, Torres has become an activist. She chronicled her experience in a 2010 book, Abuse Hidden Behind the Badge, and has periodically testified before lawmakers as a victim of police violence.

Torres never travels alone, fearful that her activism might incite her ex-husband and his supporters.

"It's horrible because you don't know who to trust, you don't know who's watching you," Torres said. "He still has power here in Philadelphia."

She added: "There is a unique injustice that takes place when the abuser is a police officer, because the people who should help you would rather protect him because of the title he holds."

James Carpenter, the chief of the District Attorney's Family Violence and Sexual Assault Unit, has spent 16 years overseeing domestic-violence cases.

His deputy, John Delaney, has spent 20 years dealing with them.

Both men said domestic-violence incidents that involve cops are prosecuted as aggressively as those involving civilian offenders.

"Years and years ago, you wouldn't have seen a police officer arrested for hitting his wife," Delaney said. "A responding officer would have said to the wife, 'What did you do to deserve this?' But for the most part, those days are gone."

A retired female Philadelphia police officer who spent more than two decades on the force said she routinely saw police-involved domestic cases ignored by her peers and her supervisors.

The issue is a personal one for the retired cop: She didn't want her name used because her daughter is trying to extricate herself from a dangerous, violent relationship with an officer.

"The Police Department does not hold their officers accountable for acts of violence in the home unless their hand is forced," said the officer, who shared her experiences with the Daily News.

She recalled responding to a domestic-violence call in West Philly's 19th District in 1995 and finding a middle-age woman with bruises around her neck. The woman's husband was a cop.

The retired officer said she called a supervisor to the scene. Her boss told her to leave. The abuser wasn't arrested.

"I've seen numerous officers put on desk duty after being served with a protection-from-abuse order, but very few of them lost their job or even received any type of discipline," she said.

"The last I remember, assaulting someone is a crime. Police officers are not exempt!"

Delaney said it might seem as if police-involved domestics are making headlines more frequently now because more women are finding the courage to speak out.

That's not to say, though, that it's easy for victims to ask for help or get away from toxic situations.

According to court records, Ricardo Gonzalez was involved in three other domestic incidents before the 2012 arrest.

In one of those instances, Gonzalez allegedly pulled out a gun and told his wife that he wanted to kill her and himself - but his wife did not file a complaint.

"It's hard for domestic-violence victims to leave, especially when they've been told by their abuser, 'No one's going to believe you,' " said Molly Callahan, the legal center director for Women Against Abuse.

"When the abuser is a police officer, they have that credibility built in, which makes it that much harder for victims to feel like they can leave."

So what is it about the profession that makes police officers more likely than others to be involved in domestic violence?

Different theories abound.

The retired female Philly cop said she came across scores of male and female officers who were traumatized by the stress of their job - the constant exposure to death and violence and hostility - but few seemed to consider seeking professional help.

"Some people would drink," she said. "Some people would go home and beat their wives."

Carpenter said people who have stressful jobs and a lack of outlets could turn to substance abuse, which could lead to a higher risk of domestic abuse.

But make no mistake: Having a stressful job doesn't mean a person has to smack around his spouse.

"With most domestic-violence cases, you have men with control issues - the guy who is checking his girlfriend's phone every night, accusing her of stuff and gradually destroying her self-esteem," Carpenter said.

"Stress and drug and alcohol abuse doesn't cause that."

Lt. John Stanford, a police spokesman, said officers can get confidential family, couples or individual counseling through an employee assistance program.

The department also regularly trains officers on how to respond to domestic-abuse calls, and that training "touches on" abuse within an officer's home, he added.

Stanford agreed that the reported number of police-involved domestics in Philly seems low.

"I personally think domestic violence is underreported, period, not just in the police profession," he said.

The department overhauled the way officers process domestic calls after the rate of all domestic homicides spiked in 2009.

Under the guidance of then-Deputy Commissioner Patricia Giorgio-Fox, the report officers file when they respond to a domestic - called a 75-48D - was revamped, requiring officers to ask more than two dozen questions of the victims and input a variety of details about the personal histories of the abuser and the victim.

The department also formed a domestic-violence law-enforcement committee that includes Women Against Abuse, the District Attorney's Office and other agencies to further fine-tune the collective response to domestic assaults.

Directive 90, the department's domestic-abuse policy, includes an appendix on how to handle police-involved domestics: Responding cops are required to call for a supervisor and confiscate city-issued firearms if a spouse gets a protection-from-abuse order.

"I think the Police Department does take this issue seriously. They have good policies and procedures in place," Callahan said.

"The hardest thing for victims - and rightly so - is feeling everyone from the courts to whomever else they're talking to is taking them less seriously because the abuser is a police officer."

Even if an officer is fired for domestic abuse and arrested, it's not uncommon for the wheels to fall off the case.

"It can be a very difficult dynamic to get a conviction because of the way the cycle of abuse works," Carpenter said.

"If the abuser has a job supporting the victim, and they have a child together . . . the victim may not want to pursue it as you move forward," he said. "A woman might feel that she loves her husband and doesn't want him to go to jail."

Teresa Garvey, an attorney adviser for AEquitas, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that provides resources to prosecutors handling domestic-violence cases, said victims are often afraid of participating in a trial.

"I know some of the intimidation and fear and pressure is greater on those victims, for a few different reasons," she said.

"Often, law-enforcement families have very active social relationships where all the families do things together, so you know there's going to be pressure from [the abusers'] friends and their families," she said.

"We also have the fact that police officers in general are often specifically trained on manipulative techniques . . . even without laying a hand on the victim, they know how to intimidate."

Last fall, Lt. Marques Newsome was fired and arrested after he pinned his girlfriend against a couch in her parents' house and broke her nose while he was off-duty, according to court records.

But when Newsome was locked up a week after the incident, his attorney, Anthony Voci, said Newsome's girlfriend didn't want to pursue the charges.

Voci noted at the time that the couple had an infant together.

The charges against Newsome - aggravated assault, simple assault, stalking and possessing an instrument of crime - were withdrawn in March after the victim missed a preliminary hearing.

Newsome got his job back.

- Staff writer Morgan Zalot

contributed to this report.