We’ll call her Maya, an immigrant who came to California from her native India soon after she had an arranged marriage with a well-paid techie in the Silicon Valley. That was three years ago.

Right from day one, Maya’s husband began exercising total control over what she ate, wore and whom she socialized with. She had cousins in the Bay Area, but she wasn’t allowed to invite them over. He told her that he was doing all that only because he cared deeply about her, that he needed to protect her. The smitten woman believed him. After all, most of what he told her were things she wanted to hear.

But when the 28-year-old woman found out that he was monitoring her every move via a location tracker he had installed on her cell phone, she realized that that was not how a loving husband should behave. She confronted him. From that point on things between them got worse, but it would be a whole year before she left him. 

In the case of Mexican immigrant Blanca Gomez, the emotional struggles she endured in her marriage were of a different nature. The 56-year-old woman was forced to spend all the money she made from cleaning houses to take care of the household expenses for herself, her husband and their two sons — from groceries to utilities to the rent for their four–bedroom house in Pinole, Calif. Gomez never got up the nerve to ask her husband, who was a manager of an auto repair garage in the East Bay, why he didn’t share the expenses, especially since his mother and brother were sharing the home with them. 

But what rankled her even more was that her husband had banned her from speaking English with their two U.S.-born sons or with friends who visited them. Since she migrated to the U.S. as a young woman, she had longed to learn to speak English so she could better her job prospects.  “Stick to Spanish,” he would tell her sternly. “Your accent and grammar are embarrassing.”

Behavioral experts would describe the conduct Maya and Gomez experienced at the hands of their intimate partners as domestic abuse. It includes behaviors that are “often wrapped in a package of caring,” as Lisa Aronson Fontes, a psychologist, author and activist, puts it. Because there are no broken bones or black eyes, frequently the victim is even unaware that she — it is usually women who experience this — is being abused. Often, she is gaslighted by the perpetrator, leaving her confused and isolated. 

But now California has a law on the books that gives some protection to people who experience this form of domestic abuse. Until now, domestic violence laws in California failed to capture “the full range of behavior that constitutes domestic violence,” Fontes said.  The new law broadens the range of abusive behaviors contained in the laws. It could substantially change the way domestic abuse is handled by the courts and by the police.

Isolating someone from her network, like Maya was, is an example of this form of domestic abuse. Such abuse often leads to physical violence. Research has shown that men who kill their female partners dominate them first, Fontes said.

In 2004, Tasmania in Australia criminalized this form of behavior, and in England and Wales abusers found guilty of this form of behavior could face up to five years in prison. The U.S. still has a lot of catching up to do.

With this grant from the Center for Health Journalism’s Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund, I plan to write three, possibly four, stories centered around the new law. These stories will include interviews with law officials and those in and outside the criminal justice system. It will have data that evaluates how effective the law has been thus far. Most importantly, it will have the voices of those who have survived the abuse.

I would also like to explore how immigration laws intersect this law.

I would like to find out what steps California is taking to educate the police, advocates, judges and the general public to ensure the law can be effectively enforced.

Through these stories, my hope is for women to know that they no longer have to stay in an abusive situation simply because their partner didn’t break their bones or cause them other physical harm. 

These stories will not only appear in ethnic media outlets, but the San Francisco Public Press has agreed to team up with me to give my stories greater exposure.

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SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — An employee opened fire Wednesday at a California rail yard serving Silicon Valley, killing eight people before ending his own life, authorities said.

The suspect was an employee of the Valley Transportation Authority, which provides bus, light rail and other transit services throughout Santa Clara County, the most populated county in the Bay Area, authorities said.

The attacker was identified as 57-year-old Sam Cassidy, according to two law enforcement officials. Investigators offered no immediate word on a possible motive.

The shooting took place around 6:30 a.m. at a light rail facility that includes a transit-control center, parking for trains and a maintenance yard.

Sheriff’s spokesman Deputy Russell Davis said the attack also resulted in “multiple major injuries.” He did not know the type of weapon used. He said the victims included VTA employees. Authorities did not release any of the victims’ names.

“These folks were heroes during COVID-19. The buses never stopped running, VTA didn’t stop running. They just kept at work, and now we’re really calling on them to be heroes a second time to survive such a terrible, terrible tragedy,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Cindy Chavez.

It was not clear exactly where the shooting happened. VTA Chairman Glenn Hendricks said it took place in the rail yard but not in operations control center. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said it was his understanding the shooting happened inside the VTA building during a morning meeting.

Victims’ grief-stricken families sat huddled together, holding hands and crying, after learning they had lost a loved one, Rosen told reporters, describing the scene inside a county building.

“They’re just sitting and holding hands and crying,” Rosen said. “It’s terrible. It’s awful. It’s raw. People are learning they lost their husband, their son, their brother.” He said about 100 people were inside the family reunification center.

Police vehicles and orange crime-scene tape blocked off the area, and reporters were kept at a distance The rail yard is in the city’s administrative neighborhood, near the sheriff’s office and city and county offices.

Bomb squads were searching the rail complex after receiving information about possible explosive devices inside the building, Davis said.

Officials were also investigating a house fire that broke out shortly before the shooting, Davis said. Public records show Cassidy owned a two-story home where firefighters responded Wednesday morning. Fire crews found a fast-moving blaze after being notified by a passer-by. A neighboring house also caught fire, authorities said.

Cassidy had worked for the VTA since at least 2012, according to the public payroll and pension database known as Transparent California. His position from 2012 to 2014 was listed as a mechanic. After that, he was a substation maintainer, the records said.

VTA trains were already out on morning runs when the shooting occurred. Light rail service was to be suspended at noon and replaced with bus bridges, Hendricks told a news conference.

“It’s just very difficult for everyone to be able try to wrap their heads around and understand what has happened,” Hendricks said.

Outside the scene, Michael Hawkins told The Mercury News that he was waiting for his mother, Rochelle Hawkins, who had called him from a co-worker’s phone to assure him that she was safe.

When the shooting started, “she got down with the rest of her coworkers” and dropped her cellphone, Michael Hawkins told the newspaper. Rochelle Hawkins did not see the shooter, and she was not sure how close she had been to the attacker, her son said.

The bloodshed comes in a year that has seen a sharp increase in mass killings as the nation emerges from pandemic restrictions that closed many public places and kept people confined to their homes.

A database compiled by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University that tracks every mass killing over the last 15 years shows that the San Jose attack is the 15th mass killing so far in 2021, all of them shootings.

Eighty-six people have died in the shootings, compared with 106 for all of 2020. It is the sixth mass killing in a public place in 2021. The database defines mass killings as four people dead, not including the shooter, meaning the overall toll of gun violence is much higher when adding in smaller incidents.

White House deputy press secretary Karine Jeane-Pierre said the administration was monitoring the situation in San Jose. She reiterated President Joe Biden’s call for Congress to pass gun control measures.

“What’s clear, as the President has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country, both in mass shootings and in the lives that are being taken in daily gun violence that doesn’t make national headlines,” she said.

San Jose, the 10th-largest city in the U.S. with more than a million people, is about 50 miles south of San Francisco in the heart of Silicon Valley.

In the city itself, the most recent mass shooting occurred in 2019 at a private home, according to The Mercury News. Police said it was a quadruple murder and suicide precipitated by family conflict.

Wednesday’s attack was the county’s second shooting in less than two years. A gunman killed three people before killing himself at a popular garlic festival in Gilroy in July 2019.

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