Alexandria, Va.
In early July, Walter Reed, 39, was indicated for first-degree murder by a grand jury in Alexandria, Va. His trial is set for September 15. Besides two small articles in the Washington Post, little has been written about the case. I’m aware of it because I knew the victim.
Every weekday morning, as they headed to their babysitter, Antoinette Goode, 29, and her two children, Dajuan, 6, and Tyesha, 3, walked by my townhouse. They would be holding hands, and the kids would be clutching toys. They were usually cheerful. Things were looking up for Antoinette. She had graduated from a welfare-to-work program and was employed in the director’s office at the U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management downtown.
When I went home on Friday, May 22, I saw yellow police tape cordoning off my street. Behind the tape were toys on the ground and a pool of blood. Antoinette Goode had been stabbed to death in front of her children by Reed, her ex-boyfriend and the children’s father.
On Thursday morning, the day before her murder, Antoinette had walked into the Alexandria Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court to seek a protective order against Reed, who had a criminal record and a history of spousal abuse. The day before that, Reed’s brother and sister-in-law had phoned Antoinette twice. They were worried because Reed “was saying a lot of crazy things,” a cousin, Keisha Eaton, told me. They told Antoinette that he “might try to hurt her and the children, so she better watch her back.”
But when Antoinette told her story at the courthouse, a court worker refused to pass her request on to a judge. No protective order could be granted, Antoinette was told, because the threats were reported by a third party, and it had been over a year since Reed had threatened her directly. Dorian Green, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice, told the Washington Post that the court worker’s decision “followed the rules and procedures” under the state’s domestic-violence laws.
Back in October 1996, Antoinette did secure a protective order, when she told a judge that Reed had threatened to stab her over who would pay for diapers. In addition, Keisha Eaton told me that from time to time Reed would “hit her, push her on the ground, kick her, you name it. . . . He would show up at her babysitter’s house. He would show up at her job.” In the last year, added Eaton, Antoinette “was spending the night at my house, and he came there trying to start trouble. . . . He was stalking her.”
At the time of her death, Antoinette was seeking to end Reed’s visits with the children. A hearing on the matter had been scheduled for mid-June. She believed Reed smoked marijuana in front of the kids and forgot to give Dajuan his medicine for sickle-cell anemia. On the Wednesday before her murder, Eaton reported, Antoinette was worried when Dajuan told her: “Daddy said you don’t love me anymore and I’m a bad boy” and “[Daddy] wanted to kill himself.”
Reed’s violent past was documented in readily available court files. You would think Antoinette could have been allowed to make her case directly to a judge. At the very least, couldn’t the police have been dispatched to talk to Reed? Says Eaton, “It’s not fair, the way they turned her away.”
Now, Antoinette’s father is taking care of the children. Her family and friends are looking for ways to secure better protection for people like her so “no one else will have to go through the horror we’ve been through,” says Antoinette’s aunt, Virginia Courtney. They are hoping to collect 10,000 signatures on a petition for changing the law. What they want is to make room for common sense.
Daniel McKivergan is policy director for the Philanthropy Roundtable in Washington, D.C.
