DENVER—An international civil-rights tribunal will hear the case of a woman whose three daughters were killed eight years ago by her estranged husband.
Jessica Lenahan said she learned Friday that the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had accepted her petition. Lenahan had gotten a restraining order against her husband, Simon Gonzales, and claims that police didn’t do enough when she contacted them multiple times on June 22, 1999 to report that Gonzales had taken the girls.
Early the next day, Gonzales parked his pickup truck in front of the Castle Rock police department and fired his gun, nearly hitting a police officer. Officers shot and killed him and found the bodies of 10-year-old Rebecca, 9-year-old Katheryn and 7-year-old Leslie in his truck.
Police believe they were shot earlier as they slept but they never determined where they were killed.
The panel’s decision to take up the case comes two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Lenahan had no right to sue Castle Rock police for $30 million for failing to enforce the restraining order. In Colorado and most other states, police are immune from lawsuits over how they carry out their duties, except in cases of extreme negligence.
Lenahan told the Rocky Mountain News that she has spent the last seven years traveling across the country to speak at events and that the panel’s decision gives here new hope that her message will be heard.
“It’s no longer about me. The only thing about me that it involves is that our human rights were violated and that they continue to be violated,” she told the paper.
Police Chief Tony Lane said Simon Gonzales wasn’t permitted to come near Jessica but he was allowed to take his daughters out to dinner once a week and there wasn’t any sign that he intended to do the girls harm. Still, he said, two police cars—half of the department’s fleet at the time—drove around town looking for Gonzales and his truck after interviewing Jessica.
“There’s only one person that’s responsible for killing those girls and that’s Simon Gonzales. And nothing we could have done, with the information the officers had at the time, could have stopped that,” Lane said Monday.
Lenahan has asked the commission for undetermined financial compensation from the federal government and for domestic violence laws to be tightened.
The panel, part of the Organization of American States, can only make recommendations to governments.
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Information from: Rocky Mountain News,
