As Shelter Mourns Victim, Life--and Death--Go On : Violence: Slaying shows how aid to battered women can fall short. Long-term programs, resources are lacking.

The news swept through the shelter for battered women, casting a chill on all who heard it. One of the shelter’s own, Maria Pizano, 29, had been shot dead near Bakersfield by her longtime live-in companion, who then turned the gun on himself.

Horrified counselors and clients at South Bay-based Rainbow Services wept at the first killing in memory of a former Rainbow resident.

For them, the Aug. 7 shooting is bitter proof that the shelter system’s painstaking efforts to protect women--using restraining orders, counseling, temporary housing at a secret address--sometimes fall short when women leave the shelter’s protective walls.

Struggling to understand the tragedy, Rainbow employees gathered the week after Pizano’s death for a session that was part wake, part support group, attempting to summon the stamina to move ahead and help other women.

“It would be really hard for me to do this work if I acknowledged how often the murders of women occur,” said counselor Anne Brace. Program manager Cheryl Majka bluntly asked the group: “How do we maintain hope?”

That is a key question this summer at Rainbow, which remains a shelter in mourning. Some who work or live here have been sleeping fitfully, consoling one another, glancing around fearfully as they walk outdoors--or raging with frustration at a legal system and a society that they believe failed Pizano.

With domestic violence in California blamed for 329 homicides in 1993 and the network of 17 shelters in Los Angeles County stretched thin with too few beds for so many frightened women, running a safe house can feel like plugging a collapsing dike.

Experts say Rainbow could have done little to prevent Pizano’s killing, because it is a short-term shelter where women can live for only about 30 to 45 days immediately after leaving an abuser, and Pizano had completed her stay there. She returned home to Bakersfield with her three sons soon after, propelled by economic necessity and loneliness.

Perhaps Pizano would have benefited from a longer-term transitional shelter, suggest women’s advocates who say that many women cannot remake their lives in just one month. But fewer than 30 long-term shelter beds are available for battered women countywide.

So at Rainbow, where 18 women and children filled every bed this week, the staff is fighting new battles for new clients even as they ruminate about why Pizano died.

They recall that when Pizano lived at the nonprofit shelter last spring, she had glowed with a good-humored spunkiness that defied the popular notion of the battered, broken woman.

One evening she borrowed a tape recorder and, when the children were in bed, set the shelter’s living room reverberating with lively Mexican music. Then she laughingly coaxed other women and counselors to learn the intricate dance steps.

“She was just so happy, like, ‘I just won the lottery, I’m not around this man anymore,’ ” recalled shelter manager Miljean Stack, 48, an eight-year Rainbow veteran who talks of Pizano as if she had been her own daughter.

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Pizano’s adolescence seems to have been short-lived. Born in Mexico, she moved to Bakersfield in her early teens and soon became involved with Pablo Nevel. She was only 14 or 15 at the time, while he was in his late 30s. She spoke little English and did not finish high school.

“I think she thought he was going to give her a better life,” said her sister, Consuelo Pizano, 23. “Or maybe she just fell in love.”

During her 14 years with Nevel, Maria Pizano had three sons: Pablo Nevel Jr., 13, Marco, 8, and Rodolfo, 7. Nevel eventually left his job as a nursery worker, disabled by diabetes and high blood pressure, and Pizano earned money picking fruit and packing carrots in the flat, sunbaked farmlands of the San Joaquin Valley.

Exactly when--and how--the relationship began unraveling is difficult to pinpoint. Pizano’s sisters say Nevel was hitting her several years ago, and then stopped but apparently continued to make threats.

“Every day, he was getting jealouser of her,” said Laura Pizano, 19, who says Nevel used to search her sister’s purse and clothes when she came home from work.

Like many accounts of domestic problems, this one has its dissenters, and two of Nevel’s daughters defend him as a kind, loving man. “He used to buy whatever she needed,” said Nevel’s daughter, Ofelia Gama, 25, who suspects Pizano really left Nevel because she was seeing a younger man.

Pizano had, in fact, grown close to a man at the packinghouse where she worked, according to family and friends. Still, they insist that her decision to leave Nevel sprang from her fear of violence.

Last spring, Pizano and the children vanished, and her sisters heard nothing from her for more than a week. When she finally called, it was from the Rainbow shelter 115 miles away in Los Angeles County.

With the help of shelter counselors, Pizano sought a restraining order, saying she left Nevel April 3 after he threatened her with a gun. Nevel countered in court documents that he never hit her, that she was leaving him for a younger man. His attorney, Raul C. Contreras, said his client consistently denied that he abused Pizano.

The restraining order restricted both parties from contact except when dealing with the children. Nevel was granted temporary visitation rights with the children pending a hearing this fall, a fact that still angers Consuelo Pizano.

“If he didn’t see the kids,” she said, “this never would have happened.”

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Pizano lived in hiding from early April to mid-May in a large South Bay house with three bedrooms crammed with bunk beds. Its windows are veiled with lace curtains and children’s laughter rises from the back yard.

Pizano swiftly made herself at home.

“I care about them all the same, but she was just so out there, open, a spunky type of person who would make you like her,” said Stack, the shelter manager.

Pizano made fresh flour tortillas for shelter workers and gave them flowers on Mother’s Day. When one worker admired her earrings, she immediately pulled them off and handed them over. Soon she was calling the staff her second family.

The Rainbow shelter does have a familial flavor; a former resident once compared it to a sorority house. But despite the communal cooking and the relaxed evening gossip sessions around the television set, the shelter’s mission is deadly serious.

Women arrive here from throughout California and beyond, some terrified, some nursing bruises or broken bones. They receive counseling and practical advice such as how to find a job, apply for welfare, obtain restraining orders and enroll in school.

Last year, 82 women and 146 children were housed in the shelter, and hundreds more were turned away for lack of space.

Pizano had talked of going to school, improving her English and finding a job. But when she moved to an apartment near the shelter, her resourcefulness seemed to falter.

She filled the rooms with furniture donated by Rainbow and Stack took her shopping to stock the refrigerator. But with the boys in school, loneliness drew her back to the shelter almost daily.

Pizano’s welfare benefits barely covered the rent, her friends and sisters say, and she missed her family. Finally, in early June, she moved north again and found work as a vineyard laborer at Dole Fresh Fruit. She did not return to Nevel and instead lived next door to her family, her sisters said.

She continued to call the shelter long distance and even telephoned workers at home.

In early August the three boys were visiting their father at his daughter’s home when Nevel asked Pizano for fresh clothes for the children, her sisters said. That Sunday morning, she ironed some clothes and rushed off, her hair still unbrushed after a shower.

No one knows for sure how long Pizano and Nevel sat inside her car, which was parked at the curb.

Nevel’s family grew alarmed when they glanced outside and saw the motionless figures, and someone called 911. The Kern County Sheriff’s Department found Pizano slumped behind the steering wheel, with Nevel dead beside her, a revolver still grasped in his hand. Between them lay the children’s clothes, soaked with blood.

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Maria Acuna was working the Rainbow hot line alone that Sunday night when the call came in. She is accustomed to hearing from sobbing women, angry women, but nothing prepared her for the heart-stopping report from Pizano’s sister.

“I was in shock, I felt so cold. I couldn’t speak,” Acuna said.

A woman arriving at the shelter the next day was told about the killing. She lay awake into the night, nervous that some client’s angry husband would invade the house and start shooting.

Case manager Patricia Serna drove with another client to the Long Beach courthouse to sit in the conference room where she once sat with Pizano. For the first time, she felt frightened going to court. A car backfired as they left the courthouse and Serna felt a flash of cold fear.

Three women from Rainbow went to Pizano’s funeral. They clustered together at the cemetery in 100-degree heat, watching silently as relatives sobbed aloud and a numb-looking Pablo Jr. helped shovel clods of dirt atop his mother’s grave.

Nevel had been buried at the cemetery a day earlier, and his family, too, is devastated. His daughter Ofelia recalls how he had sunk into deep depression and loneliness after Pizano left him, questioning how he could live without her.

The staff at Rainbow decided they should tell those living at the shelter about the shooting so they would not find out about it through rumors.

Some heard the news at a support group meeting that included women still in abusive relationships.

Several women gasped, and one cried. “I’m afraid, after hearing about that lady,” said one woman who had just left her husband. “This is a new world to me, and I feel lost.”

Afterward, another woman vowed to leave her husband by Dec. 1. “If I stay in it,” she said about her relationship, “he may be visiting me in the cemetery.”

Since Pizano’s death, Rainbow has started asking residents running errands to write down their destinations and when they will return. And Acuna feels new urgency when she warns women about being cautious when they leave for good. Do not go near their abusers, she urges. To those returning to live with an abusive partner, she says: “At the first sign of violence, leave again.”

Some shelter workers say that in order to keep functioning, they cannot dwell on the fact that women do return to violent relationships and sometimes get killed. Instead, they attempt to keep a certain distance.

The Bakersfield shooting temporarily ruptured that protective shield, and now some staff members wonder if other former clients may have died, unheralded. Others worry about the short time that women can spend at the shelter.

“We see just a slice of people’s lives, just a piece of them. And then they go off,” said Majka, who hopes Rainbow can someday start a longer-term shelter.

For many women, a 30-day shelter stay is not enough time to develop a new social network, job skills and a new source of income, said Richard Gelles, director of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of Rhode Island. Yet short-term shelters cannot afford to relax their rules because of the demand for services, he said.

One possible solution: transitional programs, where women can stay with their children for six months or longer while they receive job training and other aid. But only two such programs are operating in the county, according to the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council. Although more beds are planned, experts say the number falls seriously short of the demand.

So the shelters cope as best they can.

A few days after Pizano died, Stack reached in her desk drawer and dug out a photo of a client who had come to Rainbow severely bruised years ago. The woman has since built a new life, and last spring she sent photos to the shelter.

Looking at her face gave Stack some solace, some hope.

Yet even now, the memory of Pizano remains in painfully sharp focus.

“We need help. We need more shelters. I don’t know where we’ll get them,” Stack said, emphatic in her grief.

“This matters. A life is gone.”