Getting Tough on Domestic Violence : Battering: Victims often object to more aggressive approach. But police and prosecutors say it’s working.

There but for the grace of God and a badly aimed barbecue fork went Herminia Esqueda.

Two weeks after Nicole Brown Simpson was slashed and killed in what prosecutors say was a fit of jealousy, Esqueda was awakened by her live-in boyfriend and stabbed in the chest.

Unlike Nicole Simpson, Esqueda survived. But like the great majority of spousal abuse victims, Esqueda refused to testify against the man who police were certain would someday kill her.

Two years ago, abuse victims like Esqueda could have signed a form and authorities would have dropped the case. But armed with new guidelines designed to overcome hurdles put up by reluctant victims, this time Detective Steve Savala dragged her into court under threat of arrest.

Once there, she changed her story, testifying that she hurt herself when she fell. The jury didn’t believe her and convicted Gerardo Parra, a large man with swept-back hair whose intense gaze Esqueda avoided with downcast eyes the entire time she was on the stand doing her best to set him free.

Esqueda was not happy about it, but police and prosecutors consider her a success story in the ongoing, messy fight against domestic violence.

In May, 1994, the LAPD created and trained a special detective division called the MAC (Major Assault Crimes) Unit to combat domestic violence.

“This is having a tremendous impact,” said Mitch Robins, supervisor of the MAC Unit in Van Nuys.

“We’re getting more felony filings than ever before. We’re finding less and less of these individuals are repeat offenders.”

The numbers are showing the results of the more aggressive police approach. In 1994, there were 8,658 felony arrests out of 50,052 incidents investigated departmentwide. That represents a 17% increase over 1993 in incidents and a 10% increase in arrests.

Life on the MAC table in Van Nuys is hectic. Valleywide last year, there were 4,686 abuse cases, a 6.5% increase over the previous year.

With increased emphasis on spousal abuse and more public awareness that police now pursue cases with more vigor, detectives find themselves dealing with everything that two people can do to each other.

One morning, Marisa Hampton, a detective trainee, calls up a woman who says her husband poured cold water on her while she was asleep.

“She called the station and they sent a car,” Hampton says. “I can’t spend a lot of time on a cold-water caper.”

The greatest danger in domestic abuse is that today’s cold-water caper could be tomorrow’s broken arm and a fatal stabbing the day after that.

“It eventually builds up,” Hampton agrees. After finding out that the couple had been together 19 years and the water torture was uncharacteristic, Hampton moves on to the next case. Each detective in the unit handles up to 80 cases a month.

There are no easy choices in domestic violence. Peggy Moseley, a colleague of Hampton’s in the second-floor detective bureau, is trying to figure out what to do with a man who threw videos at his wife because she refused to make him a sandwich.

The wife has changed her mind and doesn’t want to prosecute.

Moseley knows why. So many of the women are dependent on the men for money to buy groceries and pay the rent that it is naive and elitist to say they ought to take their children and leave. For too many of them, that would mean sleeping in a car. A deal with the devil is preferable to that.

But knowing all that doesn’t make it any easier to hear women change their stories and then get hostile when Moseley tells them that even if they don’t want to prosecute, the police will go ahead anyway. “I can’t remember when I had a cooperative victim at trial,” Moseley says.

Herminia Esqueda, a pretty, sad-faced woman with long, dark hair, was a good example of what can happen when family violence escalates.

Detective Savala said there were two reports of spousal abuse involving her and Parra before the morning of June 26. That incident started out like many other abuse cases. Parra, a burly man who kept a weight machine in the living room, came home drunk at 3:30 a.m. and began arguing with Esqueda. He hit her and then he grabbed a barbecue fork and stabbed her in the chest, Savala said.

At trial, however, Esqueda says softly, mournfully, that it was her fault. Parra wanted to go back out and she grabbed his shirt. “That’s when I hurt myself, when I fell,” she says.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Walmark confronts her with her statements to police at the time. “Did you tell Detective Savala that the defendant grabbed you and began hitting you with his fists?”

“No,” she says, looking away.

Esqueda admits she was told by the Department of Children’s Services that if Parra returned home to their apartment on Vanowen Street that her 5-year-old son would be taken from her. The implication is that she would never take the chance of losing her son by lying to set her man free.

During a break, Savala says he feels sorry for the victim. “She’s on an escalating plane,” he says. “The next step is death.”

The jury convicted Parra of felony spousal abuse and he was sent to prison for three years.

Proof that there is no perfect justice in the Domestic Violence Unit, Esqueda is not living happily ever after.

“I’m now having to borrow here and there and getting into debt to pay the bills,” she said. “When my husband was here, he paid the bills.”

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Spousal Abuse Report

Felony arrests and incidents investigated set records in Los Angeles in 1994, due in part to more aggressive police investigation.

INVESTIGATIONS AND FELONY ARRESTS

Yearly totals for the city of Los Angeles:

Incidents investigated Felony arrests 1986 19,418 4,871 1987 22,872 4,878 1988 26,938 6,000 1989 31,867 6,921 1990 33,323 7,719 1991 39,154 8,276 1992 43,691 8,004 1993 42,698 7,858 1994 50,052 8,658

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SPOUSAL ABUSE DEATHS

Yearly totals for the city of Los Angeles:

1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 Van Nuys Division 0 1 3 1 0 2 1 L.A. City Total 25 25 32 25 44 45 25