Week 11: Galina Komar Danger Assessment

Please read the following case study below. 

Within your Case study groups found on the People page, complete and submit a screenshot of the danger assessment (completed score) on the case below.

Imagine you are a social worker screening the survivor below. You may not know all information needed, just work with what you have. If something is not stated, you can assume it did not occur: https://www.dangerassessment.org/DA.aspx

Only one person per group needs to submit. 

Case Study

"For more than a year, Galina Komar had endured and accommodated, loved and feared Benito Oliver.

They met in 1994 at the New Rochelle Lincoln Mercury dealership where he installed car alarms and she helped customers with financing. Mr. Oliver wooed her by "bringing flowers, talking nice," her mother, Asya Komisarchik, said.

A Russian immigrant who moved to this country at age 13, Ms. Komar never finished high school but built a career in the auto business. Mr. Oliver grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in a house with a violent stepfather, said Mr. Oliver's sister, Zaida, and had his first felony conviction, for rape, when he was 17.

The relationship turned abusive last February when he hit her with a vacuum cleaner pipe, opening a gash above her right eye that took 22 stitches to close, prosecutors said. She fled to California, but their passion drew them back together.

That cycle of violence and forgiveness, prosecutors said, is typical of abusive relationships. In August, Ms. Komar pressed charges against Mr. Oliver after he beat and threatened her in New Jersey. He spent two nights in the Middlesex County jail, but she dropped the charges. When he moved back to New York last fall, she helped him find an apartment in Brooklyn, telling the landlady "he's a wonderful man."

Yet she told friends she feared "becoming the next Nicole Brown" and said she felt like a hostage as he waited for hours in his car outside the auto showroom in Queens where she worked beginning in October.

The abuse was obvious to Ms. Komar's co-workers.

"I noticed the bruises on her face," said Marty Cerrone, the general sales manager at Koeppel Volkswagen, the Queens auto dealership. "She opened up and told me the whole story: the threats of being killed, the beatings, the punches to the legs, punches to the arms, punches to the back, slaps to the head, slammed into walls, broken furniture."

Their last night together was Dec. 14 when, she told the police, he had slammed her around his apartment, held a butcher's knife to her throat, threatened to kill her and forced her to have sex. The next morning, she arrived at her mother's apartment, ashen-faced, black and blue, with an inch-long scratch on her neck from the knife, and she called the police.

When officers arrested Mr. Oliver later that morning, he told them, "I had a fight with my girlfriend."

For the next 41 days, Mr. Oliver was jailed in the Brooklyn House of Detention, awaiting trial on misdemeanor assault charges.

When Ms. Komar learned that Mr. Oliver had been released from jail, "she was terrified," a friend, Andrew Ufnal, said. "She was crying. She said, 'I can't stand this anymore.' "

Once out, Mr. Oliver's agitation grew. He seethed to relatives that Ms. Komar was "playing me dirty," thinking she was dating someone else. He told his sister that he loved Ms. Komar, but insisted, "I'm not going to do time."

Shortly after noon, just 15 minutes before he killed Ms. Komar at the car dealership, Mr. Oliver left this message on her office voice mail:

"Galina, you hung me up. Why you hung me up? You looking for a problem? You can get it because I tried to be nice with you and you tried to be clever with me. Don't be clever with me, O.K.? So long.""