System Failure

Cheryl Palazzo lost her daughter, Lauren Ise, to a domestic violence homicide in Cranston in 2019. Photography by Wolf Matthewson

Lauren Ise knew she was going to die.

The twenty-nine-year-old had broken up with her boyfriend of two years, Michael Marrapese, a month earlier. She was getting ready to move out of the apartment they once shared in Cranston’s Edgewood neighborhood.

The relationship, like so many, started off benign. Ise and Marrapese met through a mutual friend and knew each other for a couple years before they started dating in March 2017. In the beginning, there were no red flags, according to Ise’s mother, Cheryl Palazzo. Marrapese could be charming, she says, and never raised his voice or swore at her daughter. It was only later that Palazzo began to hear rumors about his behavior in a previous relationship. She shared her concerns with her daughter, but Lauren, she says, didn’t want to believe her.

“She always thought it was the one. I think she wanted the right one. She wanted to get married and have a family,” Palazzo says.

The relationship had its challenges. Both Ise and Marrapese had a history of drug use, and Ise — who grew up in Warwick and Cranston and graduated from Johnson & Wales University — was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In March 2019, she had recently gotten clean and was looking forward to making a fresh start, according to Palazzo. She was working long hours for her stepfather’s business managing concession stands and could afford the apartment on her own. Her mother had moved to Pennsylvania a year earlier, and Ise was preparing to join her. Palazzo planned to come up to Rhode Island that weekend to help her daughter pack for the move.

“She was saving money, getting ready. And I think all of that, with him being unemployed, hanging around all day, his anger just built. And when she finally threw him out, I think that was the last nail,” Palazzo says.

Lauren Ise was twenty-nine when her ex-boyfriend murdered her in 2019. Items kept by her mother record the details of her life. Palazzo says the murder had a significant impact on Lauren’s brother, Ryan (pictured here in photos with Lauren), who lost his only sibling that day. Photography by Wolf Matthewson

Marrapese had a lengthy criminal history. Court records indicate he had at least a dozen previous charges, including breaking-and-entering and drug charges. After their breakup in February, he was arrested twice — once when he refused to allow her into the apartment, and again after an altercation with the landlord. He was held until March 5, when he was released on probation.

Ise, meanwhile, was staying at the apartment. During those last few weeks, Palazzo says, her daughter often had a friend sleep over out of fear for her safety. On the morning of March 12, she called her mother and told her Marrapese had come around to the building the night before. According to the attorney general’s office, Marrapese knocked on her windows and when she didn’t answer, confronted one of the neighbors to ask if she was dating anyone. Palazzo encouraged her daughter to call the police.

“He was there the night before, banging on her windows, telling her he was going to kill her,” she says.

On the morning of March 13, police found Ise dead in her apartment. Cuts and bruises covered her face, and several of her teeth were dislocated. There were marks around her neck, and a medical examiner determined she’d been strangled to death. Palazzo learned during the trial that Marrapese had used medical forceps to crush her daughter’s face. Defensive wounds on her hands indicated she had tried, futilely, to protect her body from the attack.

“I was living in an apartment in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And my son called me screaming, ‘He did it. He did it,’” Palazzo recalls.

Ise’s murder garnered headlines for its brutality, and for its connection to another notorious criminal — Marrapese’s father, longtime Rhode Island mobster Frank “Bobo” Marrapese. But she was far from the only woman killed in Rhode Island that year. According to data gathered by the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Ise was one of four people killed in a domestic violence homicide in the state in 2019. Between 2016 and 2020, a report by the organization shows that twenty-six people were killed in domestic violence homicides in Rhode Island, a majority of them women killed by a current or former romantic partner or bystanders to an incident of intimate partner violence. The remaining cases involved family members, roommates and a male victim killed by his wife. More than half of the perpetrators had previously been subject to a restraining order or had domestic violence charges filed against them in court.

Cheryl Palazzo tries to keep her daughter’s memory alive. Photography by Wolf Matthewson

Between 2021 and 2023, preliminary data shows another twenty-two people were killed in domestic violence homicides in Rhode Island. Recent cases include victims like Danielle Arruda, the thirty-nine-year-old pregnant mother who was shot, alongside her two children, by her husband in their West Greenwich home in a murder-suicide last year. They include Liam Dempsey, the four-year-old shot and killed by his father in a 2024 murder-suicide in Warwick. They include Leila Duarte Da Luz, the pregnant thirty-four-year-old whose body was found in Carbuncle Pond in Coventry after her ex-boyfriend and a friend murdered her in 2022. And they include those murdered in last December’s mass shooting in Pawtucket, when an ex-spouse opened fire during their son’s high school hockey game, killing their ex-wife, older son and former father-in-law and injuring two others before committing suicide.

“On average, between four and seven Rhode Islanders lose their life every year to domestic violence, and in a majority of these cases, a firearm was used,” says Lucy Rios, executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

According to research cited by the RICADV, advances in domestic violence-related laws and the expansion of victim services in the 1980s and ’90s led to an initial decrease in domestic violence homicides before the numbers leveled off. In Rhode Island, lawmakers have attempted to address the issue in the past decade through efforts such as the Protect RI Families Act — which requires individuals convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor or subject to a protective order to surrender their firearms — and the “Red Flag” law that allows law enforcement to petition to remove someone’s firearms when they pose a risk to themselves or others. These laws have been championed by domestic violence advocates who see them as essential tools for protecting victims and preventing cases from escalating into extreme violence.

And yet, every year, Rhode Islanders lose their lives to domestic violence, often following a long trail of documented concerns. Those left behind, like Palazzo, are left wondering why existing laws and systems failed to protect their loved ones. Last October, a judge sentenced Marrapese to life in prison without the possibility of parole for Ise’s murder, bringing some closure to a case that has haunted her family. But Palazzo will never know what might have happened if more had been done to keep Marrapese away from her daughter.

“Knowing that he will never walk any street again, that’s all I can offer,” she says.

According to the RICADV, 38.2 percent of Rhode Island women have experienced intimate partner violence during their lifetime. Nationally, more than one in three women (nearly 43.5 million) and more than one in six men (20.7 million) have been victims of intimate partner violence — defined as physical violence, sexual violence or stalking — according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases cut across boundaries of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and socioeconomic status and are far more numerous than most people realize, advocates say. In 2024, state and local police responded to domestic violence calls in all thirty-nine of Rhode Island’s cities and towns.

“This is a behavior that is grossly underreported. Whatever data exists, we know that actual incidents are much higher because so many people don’t report it,” says Vanessa Volz, president and CEO of Sojourner House, one of the state’s leading victim services providers.

In 1976, a group of residents and Brown University students founded Sojourner House to address what they saw as a silent epidemic of domestic and sexual violence. At the time, few resources existed for women trying to escape an abusive relationship. Co-founder Tracy Fitzpatrick first encountered the issue as a student volunteer at Rhode Island Legal Services while researching how frequently restraining orders were violated.

“We all didn’t really know what to call it even,” she says. “The whole framework was that it was a problem and often women must have done something to deserve a beating.”

Only two years earlier, Congress had passed the Equal Opportunity Credit Act, making it illegal for lenders to bar women from opening accounts based on their sex or marital status. It would be another eighteen years before the federal Violence Against Women Act established nationwide protections and resources for victim services. Volz notes Sojourner House has come a long way in that time, evolving from a volunteer hotline into a comprehensive victim services agency offering emergency shelter, legal representation, support groups, sexual health advocacy, basic needs assistance and more.

In the past decade, as Rhode Island’s housing shortage has reached a critical point, the agency has taken on another role: housing developer. Once focused on immediate support, Sojourner House now owns or leases close to 200 apartment units across the state to provide a longer-term solution for its clients, in addition to three emergency shelters.

“Once the initial crisis stabilizes, clients often still need a considerable amount of support to live a violence-free life,” Volz says. “And the housing crisis has really just exacerbated this whole situation because it’s so expensive to rent.”

Even with the extra capacity, the agency is unable to keep up with demand. In 2025, only 11 percent of clients who called seeking emergency shelter could be placed that same day. The RICADV, too, has seen its member agencies impacted by the housing shortage. Where once an average shelter stay was twenty-eight days, now women and their families are staying in emergency shelter six months or longer as they seek out longer-
term arrangements. It’s just one of several economic and policy factors, according to Rios, that contributes to a broader increase in violence.

“So often when people think about domestic violence, they focus on the individuals. Domestic violence is a societal issue,” she says. “It’s not just about something that happens between two people.”

According to Gillian Palmer, law enforcement training and community engagement manager for the RICADV, the two most dangerous times for domestic violence victims is when they try to leave a situation and when they’re pregnant. A 2022 study found that pregnant and immediately postpartum women in the United States are more likely to be murdered than to die from a pregnancy-related health issue. Firearms also pose a significant risk, with women in abusive relationships five times more likely to be killed if their partner has access to a firearm. Of the twenty-one intimate partner homicide incidents that took place in Rhode Island between 2016 and 2020, nine of them involved guns.

“With the victim leaving, they’re getting more autonomy, they’re trying to get out of the situation, [and] offenders feel like they lost that power and control,” Palmer says. “And they will do anything that they need in order to regain that.”

Robyn left an abusive relationship in 2017 and now advocates on issues around domestic violence as a member of Sisters Overcoming Abusive Relationships. Photography by Wolf Matthewson

Robyn remembers the night in 2017 when everything fell apart.

She was asleep at the Pawtucket house she shared with her boyfriend and five children. The couple had been arguing for months about his drinking and money problems, but the issue tonight went far beyond a few wayward bottles and overdrawn accounts.

“He woke me up accusing me of cheating [and] smashed my phone. I ran into the kitchen, and he was behind me with a butcher knife,” says Robyn, who asked to be identified by her first name.

“The two little ones came into the kitchen, and they were sitting on my lap. And they’re hysterical, and they’re like, ‘Don’t hurt Mommy, don’t hurt Mommy, Daddy,’” she recalls. “In my head, I’m like, ‘I’m going to die tonight. This is it. This is going to be the end of me.’”

After getting the kids back to bed, he demanded she follow him into the bedroom, where he threw her on the bed and tried to strangle her. She fought back, and they continued arguing until he laid down and fell asleep. Afterward, she went outside the bedroom and cried.

“I was in shock. I was in disbelief,” she says. “The next day, he wakes up like nothing happened.”

Robyn knew she had to plan her next move carefully. A few months earlier, she tried to break up with him after he trashed the house while drinking with friends during a football game, only to be told, “The only way you’re leaving is if you’re six feet in the ground.” The house they lived in belonged to his mother, and Robyn had limited family in the area. For months, she’d been looking for an opportunity to leave, uncertain of where to go next.

At the same time, she tried to maintain as normal a life as possible for her children. She was heavily involved as a parent advocate with Head Start, the federally funded preschool program that her second youngest attended as a toddler. She worked her way up to a position with the National Head Start Association and frequently attended conferences and meetings as a volunteer. A week later, she was at one of these meetings in Nashua, New Hampshire, when she learned her boyfriend had smashed her car with a stick during the night. The next morning, he arrived at the hotel and tried to force his way into her room as she held the door. Someone told her he brought a gun. The hotel alerted local police, but he had already left by the time officers arrived.

Robyn drove the hour and fifteen minutes home to Rhode Island and reported the incident to Pawtucket police. Her boyfriend was arrested and charged with domestic felony assault, strangulation, vandalism and disorderly conduct,

according to court records. He posted bail and was released shortly after.

During her drive home from New Hampshire, and again following his release from jail, contacts began to receive nude photos of her sent from her email account. Believing he hacked her account, she reported the harassment to police. Several days later, after violating the terms of his release, he was arrested and this time held for a month. The temporary reprieve, she says, gave her the space to find a new housing arrangement and start fresh.

“I had a huge sigh of relief. I was going to have thirty days of a normal life,” she says.

Her story demonstrates some of the common complaints domestic violence advocates raise with the criminal justice system. Though various legal tools exist to protect victims — including protective orders and measures to prevent abusers from accessing guns — advocates say these tools sometimes go unenforced, and offenders are not always prosecuted to the full extent of the law. In Robyn’s case, her ex pled no contest to domestic felony assault and had several other charges dismissed. He received a six-year suspended sentence and six years of probation and ultimately served no jail time. He is now married and owns a small business.

“There’s a big difference between having a policy and having a law versus the implementation,” says Somaly Prak-Martins, director of prevention for the RICADV.

In addition to the suspended sentence, Robyn’s ex was ordered to pay restitution and attend a Batterers Intervention Program. According to the RICADV, these class-based programs — required of all defendants convicted of a domestic violence crime in Rhode Island — are ineffective and underfunded. A 2022 report by the Justice Reinvestment Initiative titled “Improving Domestic Violence Responses in Rhode Island” found that the state’s Batterers Intervention Programs lacked a consistent curriculum, relied on self-reported data from clients and grouped individuals with varying histories and risk levels into identical programs, raising questions about their effectiveness.

Domestic violence advocates also cite offenders’ access to firearms as a major concern. Rhode Island has made significant strides in restricting domestic violence offenders’ access to guns over the past decade. However, recent cases demonstrate the limits to these protections. In 2024, Joseph Francis of Hopkinton murdered his estranged wife, Stephanie Francis, in her home before killing himself during a police chase. Four years earlier, local police had denied Joseph’s application to purchase firearms on the basis of previous charges, including cyber-harassment of a woman, according to reporting in The Boston Globe. Joseph fought back in court and his application was ultimately approved. When police responded to a domestic violence call at the home in the weeks before Stephanie’s murder, they seized several firearms from Joseph and ordered him to turn over any others. Stephanie told them he owned additional guns, but she didn’t know where they were. About a month later, Joseph returned to the house with the shotgun that he used to kill his wife.

“With protective orders, offenders are supposed to relinquish firearms. We know that doesn’t always happen,” says Palmer of the RICADV.

In 2018, Rhode Island passed the Extreme Risk Protection Order law, which enables law enforcement to petition to remove firearms from someone who poses a threat to themselves or others. The measure, also known as a “Red Flag” law, was championed as an essential tool for preventing suicide, domestic homicide and other cases of extreme violence. However, as Haley Gervino, director of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, points out, Rhode Island still lags behind other states. In many places, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, household members and health care professionals can also petition for someone’s firearms to be removed, eliminating the need for police to initiate.

“In most cases of mass violence, including involving firearms, the perpetrator tells people closest to them that they have plans to do this, and those are the individuals who will recognize a shift in behavior ahead of a law enforcement officer who wouldn’t know that personally,” Gervino says.

Domestic violence organizations have also advocated for steeper penalties in cases that escalate to attempted homicide. In April, Sojourner House submitted written testimony in favor of House bill 8055, which would increase the minimum sentence for assault with intent to commit murder from one to ten years and eliminate the possibility of a suspended sentence or parole.

Alyssa Garcia, an attempted homicide survivor who has advocated publicly for the bill, says she’s heard from other women who feel a higher minimum sentence would help them move on in rebuilding their lives after an attack. The bill was held for further study.

“I think that ten-year minimum gives you the structure and stability that you need … without having the fear that your perpetrator’s going to be coming out of jail in three years,” she says.

Robyn is no stranger to the legislative process. After leaving her abuser in 2017, she began attending monthly meetings with Sisters Overcoming Abusive Relationships, a survivor-led task force of the RICADV that advocates on issues around domestic violence. Members testify on domestic violence-related legislation and share their stories to raise awareness. Robyn’s first testimony was on the state’s “revenge porn” bill, which made it illegal to share sexually explicit photographs of someone without their consent. Passed in 2018, the bill would have applied to her situation had it been in effect the previous year.

Other legislative victories have included the Early Lease Termination Act, which allows abuse survivors to end a lease early to flee a dangerous situation, and the Protect All Children Act, which extends restraining order protections to all children in a situation. The group uses trauma-informed methods to put survivors’ priorities first and has served as a model for peer task forces around the country, according to Kristi Di Cenzo, SOAR coordinator and a survivor herself.

Kristi Di Cenzo, left, a survivor of domestic violence, is the coordinator of SOAR. Photography by Wolf Matthewson

“People are dying, and families are suffering,” Di Cenzo says. “There’s no accountability when it comes to those systems that are the ones investigating.”

A year after leaving her abuser, Robyn spoke about her experience with domestic violence at a national Head Start conference. One of the women in the room, she says, wrote her a letter sharing she was going through the same thing, and thanked her for empowering her to feel like she could get out.

“If I only touch one person and make a difference to one person, I’m OK with that. Because you change one person at a time,” Robyn says. “And that, to me, is very impactful.”

On a warm night in August, several dozen people gather at River Island Art Park in Woonsocket.

Two weeks earlier, police found twenty-nine-year-old Gabriela Vallejo dead in her apartment only a short distance from here. Vallejo, pregnant and mother to a six-year-old, was stabbed several times in the neck. Police arrested her boyfriend, William Santiago Ramos, and charged him with her murder. Court records show no plea was entered, and the case remains pending.

Tonight, friends and advocates gather to pay tribute to Vallejo’s memory, along with another city resident recently lost to tragedy. Lisa Pina-Warren, executive director of the Nonviolence Institute, addresses the crowd.

“These tragedies impact all of us,” she says. “Our communities are going through so much, we’re struggling. There’s so much loss right now.”

According to Sojourner House, more than sixty people have been lost to domestic violence homicide in Rhode Island over the past ten years. It’s a crisis CEO Volz says goes far beyond one family’s grief.

“I’m not sure everyone understands how serious of an issue this is. I think it’s a public health epidemic,” she says.

Advocates point to economic stressors as well as a culture of interpersonal violence. On the national level, they fear the issue may be losing traction among policymakers. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced plans to consolidate the Office on Violence Against Women into a larger federal department, a move Volz fears could result in fewer resources. The agency relies on government grants for 84 percent of its budget, mostly federal ones that she worries could be impacted by funding cuts under President Donald Trump.

“This used to be a bipartisan issue. It’s become more of a partisan issue,” she says.

Locally, advocates have had greater success. Earlier this year, the General Assembly approved funds to create and staff a dedicated domestic violence calendar for Superior Court, a measure supported by the RICADV. The calendar, expected to take effect this fall, will establish a dedicated judge and support staff to work through the court’s backlog of felony domestic violence cases — some of which stretch back years, according to Superior Court Presiding Justice Joseph Montalbano. Associate Justice Linda Rekas Sloan will hear the domestic violence cases.

“We currently have approximately 1,250 pending felony domestic violence cases,” Montalbano says. “And one out of every four new criminal cases that’s filed in Superior Court is a domestic violence case.”

Montalbano says he expects another 1,500 felony domestic violence cases to be filed this year. In addition to working through the backlog, advocates say the new calendar will create greater continuity for repeat offenders and ensure a judge who has experience handling domestic violence cases. The court is also seeking funds to establish a domestic violence education unit, which Montalbano says will monitor defendants to ensure they’re meeting the conditions of their bail, such as protective orders and substance use counseling.

Ultimately, advocates say, curbing domestic violence in the community will require a broader cultural change. In addition to the housing shortage and funding worries, the RICADV has raised concerns that the federal immigration crackdown may discourage clients from seeking help due to a fear of deportation. But there are bright spots, too. Executive Director Rios says the #MeToo movement of the 2010s emboldened survivors to speak out in a way not previously seen.

“We need the community to own this issue, to say, ‘We are not going to tolerate this anymore. This is not OK. It harms us.’ And hold the people that are using domestic violence accountable,” she says. “It can’t just be us alone.”

Cheryl Palazzo still cries when she looks at photographs of her daughter, Lauren.

The images record memories of a full life: Lauren on the dance team at Cranston High School East, Lauren as a child with a bow in her hair, Lauren at a birthday party for her cousin’s daughter. Mother and daughter both loved the beach, and Palazzo recalls long beach days and the drive home, when they’d stop for ice cream and Lauren would get a Del’s. Her daughter had a degree in criminal justice and talked about using it to help others. It’s a dream she never lived to see fulfilled.

“She was the light of my life,” Palazzo says.

She tries to keep Lauren’s memory alive by posting on social media, but as time goes on, fewer and fewer people respond. People move on, she says. In the years since, dozens of other names have taken Lauren’s place as the state’s most recent victims of domestic homicide. As a parent, one of her greatest worries is that her daughter’s memory will die. It’s a big responsibility, one that has fallen almost entirely on her shoulders. But Palazzo says she doesn’t mind.

“That’s what moms are for.”

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If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, there are resources in Rhode Island to help.

Helpline RI (24 hours): 800-494-8100, helplineri.com

Sojourner House: 765-3232, sojournerri.org