Holiday domestic violence cases spur call for action

Ken Ritter

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2001 | 12:43 p.m.

Marina Cannon-Zakouto predicted her husband would kill her. She was beaten to death two days before Christmas.

Lisa Chayra said her husband used to hold a gun to her head. She left him after seven years when she realized his flowers, poems and promises to change were meaningless.

"I'm living proof you can get out," Chayra said Friday as she and Cannon-Zakouto's son, Jason Jaeger, lent their voices to a campaign to curb domestic violence in and around Las Vegas.

Jaeger said sadly that his mother couldn't get away. She moved out, changed her name back to Marina Cannon, joined the Southern Nevada Domestic Violence Task Force. And she wrote a will describing her fear of Vitaly Zakouto, who has been charged with murder in her death.

State and local officials pointed Friday to Cannon-Zakouto's death, the shooting death of a 25-year-old woman and arrest of her husband a week before Christmas and a Christmas morning shooting involving a Henderson, Nev., couple visiting their daughter in Southern California to underscore the need for more awareness about violence in the home.

Kathleen Brooks, Safe Nest executive director, and M. Veronica Frenkel, coordinator of Nevada's domestic violence programs, called the spate of holiday tragedy unusual but not isolated.

Frenkel said law enforcers statewide handled 18,000 domestic violence cases in 1999, and nearly 20,000 in 2000.

Las Vegas has an eight-detective unit headed by Lt. Brad Simpson devoted to crimes of domestic violence.

Brooks urged people during a news conference to "reach out to someone you know who is being battered or who is a batterer."

She said Safe Nest in Las Vegas or Safe House in Henderson can help.

Abuse can be physical, sexual, economic, verbal or emotional, Brooks said. Sometimes it involves destruction of property or the harming of pets.

"If you're a woman or a man being abused, get help," she said.

Brooks noted that men claim to be victims in about 5 percent of domestic violence cases.

Bonny Midby, head of the Domestic Violence Task Force, pointed to a window-sized plaque bearing names of 98 Nevada residents killed in domestic violence since January 1997. Their ages ranged from infant to 75 years old. Twenty were children, she said.

Frenkel said about 20 percent of homicide cases in Nevada involve family members and said children were present in almost four in 10 cases of domestic violence reported in 1999.

"We're dealing with lethal violence," she said.

Chayra, 33, said her violent marriage reflected the abuse she saw in her home growing up. She remembered picking up a bat when she was 9 years old to stop her father from strangling her mother.

She said she hoped telling her story would help "reach someone like me, who felt trapped in an abusive relationship and felt there was no way out."