Independence murder evokes bigger questions on partner violence

This story mentions domestic violence. If you or someone you know has experienced domestic violence, call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233.

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and the timing couldn’t be more unfortunate.

At the end of last month, Donald Bryant killed his 24-year-old ex-finance, Heaven Glisson, at the Taylor Ridge Apartments in Independence before taking his own life. Bryant had also shot 33-year-old Daylon Bradford at the complex. Bradford was transported to the hospital, where he later died.

Subsequent news reporting revealed that Bryant had been abusive to Glisson.

What’s more, Bryant had a long rap sheet, having been subject to protective orders from a previous relationship as well as a long list of charges in Boone County from 2018, according to court records: burglary, assault and trespassing, among others.

Glisson herself had sought a protection order against Bryant in March but later withdrew the request, according to court records. The records did not indicate why.

Both members of Glisson’s family, as well as some members of the public, were critical of the police’s response, characterizing it as inadequate, given Bryant’s history. The police had even been called on Bryant only a few days before, but that encounter did not end in an arrest.

LINK nky investigated to see why the police acted the way they did, what they legally can and can’t do in partner violence cases and what changes would be needed to create more guardrails against cases like this in the future.

What emerges is a picture of a legal infrastructure that has made piecemeal changes over time but for which there are still lingering definitional and mechanical quandaries about violence between partners and family members.

The police and partner violence

“Just because you think that an officer should be able to take somebody to jail doesn’t mean that you can,” said Independence Police Chief Brian Ferayorni. “And sometimes that’s frustrating, especially to victims and witnesses that don’t understand the laws.”

Ferayorni’s department headed up the handling of the Glisson case and sat down with LINK nky in early October to discuss the process of handling domestic violence and abuse as police officers. Ferayorni had observed how different violent acts had changed legal status, even throughout his own career. He gave an example: choking.

“Strangulation was recently changed to be a felony,” Ferayorni said. Strangulation was made a Class C felony in 2019.

“So when I first started,… it was considered assault [in the fourth degree], which is a misdemeanor,” Ferayorni continued. “And then situations occur where people die or they get severely injured, and then the laws change. So now we have felony strangulation.”

This example is illustrative not only because it shows the piecemeal nature of how the law deals with abuse but also because it highlights how the actions are constrained by what counts as a felony, what counts as a misdemeanor, and the evidentiary requirements that come with each category.

To give an even starker example than Ferayorni’s example of strangulation, spousal rape didn’t count as a felony in Kentucky until 1990, and even then, it took more changes to the law before the requirement to report the incident within a year was removed.

Independence PD got flak on social media for its handling of the Glisson case, so much so that Feryaroni sent out an eight-page statement and timeline, which you can read here, to news orgs in hopes of correcting what he described as “inaccurate information,” about the Sept. 22 call that concluded in the three deaths, as well as a Sept. 19 call about Bryant that preceded it.

The Sept. 19 call against Bryant was not a domestic violence call, Ferayorni pointed out, but rather a call for an emotional crisis. Glisson made the call, the police report states, and “advised dispatch that the suspect was a meth user, had threatened suicide and was armed with a kitchen knife.”

The report for that call indicates that Bryant had entered Glisson’s apartment after one of her friends dropped off her kids for Glisson to watch and left the door unlocked. Bryant eventually left the apartment voluntarily, according to the police report.

One of the misconceptions that had been floating around on social media, Ferayorni said, “was that he committed domestic violence that Friday night [Sept. 19]. He did not.” Rather, the call focused mostly on whether Bryant was going to follow through on his threat to take his own life.

It is worth noting that Glisson had told one of the officers that night she “was upset and wanted to know why [Bryant] wasn’t going to jail. He advised her that they had a child in common, so officers were not going to arrest him. Heaven was upset by this and walked away. [The officer] explained to the family how to file an EPO [emergency protective order] on Monday and trespassed Bryant from the apartment.”

Here we’re directly confronted with the aforementioned categorical questions.

Several different charges are associated with abuse and domestic violence, and the evidence required to make an arrest varies with each.

For example, so-called “verbal domestic” calls (i.e., people shouting and arguing) are not a crime if they stay in the home. If it spills into a public space, it becomes disorderly conduct, a crime for which an officer can make an arrest.

“Physical domestic” calls, which are exactly what they sound like, are arrestable. Still, there has to be evidence of the physical violence taking place, such as a discernible injury on someone’s body, video, photographs, or statements from victims and witnesses that can corroborate other evidence.

Trespassing can be criminal or civil in nature. What officers do in that situation is dependent on the relationships of the people involved (see above) and who is legally occupying a particular residence.

Stalking can get you arrested, Ferayorni explained, but it is often difficult to prove. Kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, which are similar to kidnapping but legally less serious, are both arrestable. More violent crimes like murder, rape and violent assaults are naturally arrestable.

What about crisis calls?

These can be related to domestic violence calls, but they usually don’t rise to the level of criminal charges. An officer can force someone undergoing an emotional crisis to go to the hospital for treatment; however, they need evidence to justify that action.

Ferayorni admitted that police officers “probably need to do a better job of explaining sometimes why we can and can’t do things. That sometimes is hard when victims and witnesses are not cooperative after they find out that the desired outcome isn’t going to happen.”

The Independence Police Department reported 431 calls for domestic trouble, 126 calls of harassment and stalking and 182 emotional crisis calls in 2024, according to its most recent annual report.

Bryant killed Glisson early in the morning on Sept. 22. While Feryaroni said that Glisson and Bradford seemed to know each other, the exact dynamic of their relationship or the circumstances leading up to Bryant shooting him are still under investigation.

In any case, it’s worth noting that Glisson had previously attempted to sever her relationship with Bryant.

“We know the majority of murders and suicides happen at that point of separation, or when someone else is trying to leave…,” Christy Burch, CEO of the ION Center for Violence Prevention, said, “Oftentimes the violence doesn’t end just because someone has ended that relationship.”

The ION Center, which has an office in Covington, is one of 15 networked partner violence shelter providers in the commonwealth that belong to ZeroV, formerly known as the Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

“It is truly about escaping,” Burch said. “It’s not just breaking up with somebody or leaving a relationship.”

Existing legal mechanisms against violence

Following the passage of Senate Bill 271 in 2022, the Kentucky Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Center began tracking fatalities related domestic violence and other incidents related to abuse. In practice, much of this data comes from police officers filing out and submitting special electronic forms called JC-3 forms as they encounter abuse and domestic violence.

The center also collects data on various kinds of protective orders issued by the courts. This data is then split up based on the state’s area development districts.

The Northern Kentucky Area Development District spans the commonwealth’s eight northernmost counties, including Boone, Kenton and Campbell Counties. In 2024, police submitted 2,236 JC-3 forms and made 654 arrests for JC-3-related incidents, according to the center’s most recent annual report.

Both of these figures were slight increases from 2023. The arrests accounted for about 8% of the domestic violence arrests in the state. Most of the state’s arrests occurred under the aegis of the Kentucky Regional Planning & Development Agency, which serves Bullitt, Henry, Jefferson, Oldham, Shelby, Spencer and Trimble counties.

A person trying to escape a violent relationship can seek a temporary protective order from an abuser by filing a petition with the county circuit court online anytime, 24/7. A judge will then determine whether or not to issue either an emergency protective order, or EPO, or a temporary interpersonal protective order, or TIPO, against someone accused of abuse.

Here, the categorical question arises again as one of the metrics judges use to make this decision is whether the alleged conduct meets the legal definition of domestic violence and abuse, dating violence and abuse, sexual assault or stalking, all of which have specific legal criteria laid out in statute that or may not conform to an everyday understanding of these terms.

If a temporary protective order is granted, a judge can then set a hearing within 14 days to determine if a long-term order is necessary. The court sends out a summons to the alleged abuser, called a “respondent” in legal jargon, so they can attend the hearing and defend themselves.

The temporary order lasts until the hearing. Long-term protective orders can last up to three years and can come with other stipulations, such as mandated child separation, counseling, and orders to relinquish guns and other weapons.

There were 2,043 petitions for temporary protective orders in the Northern Kentucky Area Development District in 2024; 571 were denied and 1,235 were granted temporary protective status.

In 2024, 2,057 long-term order cases in the Northern Kentucky Area Development District were resolved in court. Of those cases that made it through court, 974 were dismissed, 571 were denied, 498 were granted, one wasn’t properly served and 13 others had other outcomes not elaborated upon in the report.

Getting through the civil court process for a long-term order is more involved than getting a temporary order, so those figures may not necessarily draw on the same people as the figures for the temporary orders; the cases could have come from earlier years.

Violating a protection order – ideally – should serve as a means by which a victim can more easily get their abusers charged with a crime. Some counties also have GPS monitoring equipment, which a petitioner can ask to have placed on their abuser to track their movements better.

This doesn’t stop people from violating them, however. There were 1,314 charges related to domestic violence in the Northern Kentucky Area Development District in 2024, which includes not only violations of a protective order but also assault, murder, rape and stalking.

As mentioned before, the report has only been around since 2022, and even during that time, what falls under the umbrella of domestic violence has shifted.

Beginning in 2023, for instance, human trafficking was removed as a category of crimes related to domestic violence, even though sex trafficking is one of the major sub categories of human trafficking. During the last legislative session, as well, a law was passed establishing sexual extortion as a misdemeanor.

What to do about it?

Northern Kentucky Rep. Stephanie Dietz, a Republican and family practice attorney from Edgewood, introduced a bill in February that would augment Kentucky domestic and dating violence laws to include acts of what is often referred to as coercive control.

These are essentially non-physical acts of abuse that serve to exert control over someone’s life, isolate them, undermine their psychology and emotional well-being or otherwise restrict their freedom.

Many of the tactics Bryant used to control Glisson, as elided by her family, would have fallen under this rubric.

Dietz’s bill lists actions against a partner that would fall under the umbrella of coercive control, which include, but aren’t limited to:

• Threatening to damage personal property, goods or animals that have meaning to someone
• Use of technology to stalk, surveil, threaten, harass, manipulate or mislead
• Brandishing firearms to intimidate or control
• Deliberately driving recklessly with a partner or with their minor children
• Threatening to harm the partners’ friends and family, undercut their career or reputation or threaten to call the police or other law enforcement agencies, including immigration authorities, on a partner
• Threatening suicide if a partner doesn’t comply
• Exerting control over someone’s identification documents
• Threatening or making public a partner’s private information, such as their medical records, sexual orientation or gender identity or other information that might jeopardize their safety
• Subjecting a partner to physical confinement or otherwise isolating them from their friends, family or public life
• Depriving someone of basic necessities, including their own finances
• Exerting control over someone’s employment or otherwise exhausting their economic resources
• Generally, exerting undue influence over a person’s movements, social interactions, finances, medical care, children or housing

“If we can enact this type of legislation, there’s a way to protect victims on the front end before we get to the physical act of violence,” Dietz told LINK nky in a phone call, “because domestic violence is about power and control, and when you finally silo them away from money, family, friends, access to cell phones, access to credit cards, those types of things, that’s when physical violence starts.”

The bill never made it out of committee, but Dietz said she hopes reintroduce a similar bill at the next legislative session. Twenty-two states and one U.S. territory had some kind of law on the books related to coercive control, either explicitly or in practice, as of 2024. Kentucky was not among them.

Burch emphasized the need for preventative and community-based interventions to head off domestic violence. She pointed to something called Green Dot training, which some of the ION Center’s locations provide, which trains bystanders to spot and potentially intervene in high risk situations.

A 2017 study of the program published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine tracked the implementation of Green Dot training in 26 Kentucky high schools over the course of 4 years.

“During Years 3–4, when Green Dot was fully implemented, the mean number of sexual violent events prevented by the intervention was 120 in Intervention Year 3 and 88 in Year 4,” the text of the study reads.

“It’s about safety planning,” Burch said. “It’s about being able to get all the tools and support that you need to navigate this.”

Still, Burch said, it was “very important for us to hold perpetrators of violence accountable, and not the survivor accountable for the violence.”

Victims of domestic violence can also contact any of Kentucky’s 15 domestic violence programs by visiting zerov.org. NKY’s domestic violence program is the ION Center for Violence Prevention, which has 13 locations. You can call or text them at (859)491-3335.