Courts, police must heed warning signs

It must be incredibly difficult for a judge, police officer or prosecutor to wade through the acrimonious charges that fly about in many a divorce.

And it must be particularly challenging when a parent is presented as a normal, kind, loving parent despite allegations of abuse, stalking, threats.

Add in the oft-volatile exchanges from a spouse who feels wronged by the system vs. the calm presentation of the other parent, and it can be downright confusing.

And deadly.

Just ask the loved ones of Duncan and Jack Connolly, two former Algonquin boys, who were found murdered last week in the back of their father's car in a secluded part of Putnam County. Their father Michael Connelly was found hanged nearby, a double-murder and suicide that has left a family and multiple communities reeling.

Duncan, 9, and Jack, 7, were buried Friday. Their mother, Amy Leichtenberg, has blamed the judicial system for her sons' deaths and is urging us all to take a hard look at a process which permitted it.

She had pleaded with the courts and police to, first, not permit her sons to have unsupervised visits with her ex-husband - only turning them over to him after police threatened to arrest her if she didn't; and, second, to issue an Amber Alert after her boys didn't come home after one of those visits on March 8. Though LeRoy police initially put out the alert, they quickly withdrew it because they said it didn't appear the boys were threatened.

We now know that clearly was not the case. Though reinstated a day later, the belated Amber Alert was too late to rescue Duncan and Jack.

Their mom had done everything we tell victims of domestic violence to do. She twice got restraining orders from McHenry County where the difficult saga began.

"(He) tells me if I ever take the boys away he will hunt me and my parents down and cut us open," she wrote in a 2006 petition seeking an order of protection against her then-husband.

That petition, along with one filed a year earlier and others since, portrayed Connolly, 40, as emotionally abusive, obsessive about his sons and prone to bouts of rage and threats of violence.

McHenry County courts permitted only supervised visitation. McLean County Judge James Souk permitted Connolly to see his sons unsupervised despite numerous violations of another valid order of protection and other allegations of violent behavior.

Since the boys' bodies were found, almost 4,000 people have signed an online petition calling for the judge's removal.

None of us have all the information the courts may or may not have had. And we recognize domestic violence and custody cases are particularly tricky. And that most visitation issues are resolved peacefully.

But it seems very clear that at minimum the courts should have only permitted supervised visitation when such volatile conditions and clear violations were taking place.

A McHenry County judge on Thursday refused to release from jail a man accused of stalking after he violated an order of protection. It should not be a rare decision, but the norm.

There are warning signs from abusers. But they mean nothing if we don't pay attention to them.