Steve McNair, Sahel Kazemi, and the Sad Truths About Murder-Suicide

by Kate Dailey and Rebecca Shabad

After four days of speculation, the Nashville police department confirmed on Wednesday what many people had already assumed: Steve McNair was shot and killed by his girlfriend, Sahel Kazemi, who then turned the gun on herself. It was a shocking death, and the fact that a former NFL All-Pro quarterback died at the hands of a 20-year-old waitress seemed more shocking still, defying both preconceived stereotypes about women and violence and criminal profiles of these types of crimes.

Though the U.S. government doesn’t keep specific stats on murder-suicides, the Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based foundation focused on gun control, puts out a report every few years devoted to tracking such crimes. According to the latest one, published in 2008, in the United States 1,000 to 1,500 deaths per year are the result of murder-suicide. The overwhelming majority of these deaths involve firearms, and the violence is often the last act in a long pattern of domestic and emotional abuse. The Violence Policy Center found that 95 percent of murder-suicides were perpetrated by men in 2007, a number that has stayed pretty constant since the center started keeping statistics in 1992. “It’s very unusual for the woman to be a shooter in a murder-suicide,” says Kristen Rand, the center’s director of legislation.

In fact, it’s unusual for women to commit any violent crime. Homicides by a woman were never large to begin with but have declined by almost 50 percent between 1976 (when there were 3,295 homicides committed by women) and 2005 (1,826 by women), according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In that same time, the chance of a man being shot by a woman decreased by 75 percent.

That’s primarily due to an improvement in social services that removed women from violent and dangerous homes, says Jack Levine, professor of criminology at Northeastern University and coauthor of The Will to Kill: Making Sense of Senseless Murder (Allyn and Bacon 2008). “Now they have shelters, restraining orders, and police intervention,” he says. “Those things were not available 20 or 30 years ago. A woman who was abused or battered over a period of time didn’t really see a lot of options, and killing their partner was sometimes the only option they saw,” he said.

When women do kill today, they’re likely to kill someone they know well, says Levine, and in cases of murder-suicide, they usually kill just one other person—as opposed to “family annihilators,” men who kill their entire family (or office or church group) before turning the gun on themselves.

Both men and women who commit murder-suicide are often motivated by jealousy, says Louis B. Schlesinger, professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, though often to a pathological or even psychotic degree. These cases are rarely committed in the heat of the moment; there’s a pre-homicidal context that leads to a homicidal break. “I think her world was absolutely falling apart, and she thought he was the reason,” says Carol Oyster, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin and coauthor of Gun Women: Firearms and Feminism in Contemporary America (NYU Press, 2000). 

The fact that Kazemi killed McNair in his sleep fits a pattern typical of women killing men. “Most people are going to try to defend themselves,” when a gun is drawn, says Oyster. “Choosing a time when he really couldn’t fight back was, in her mind, the safest way to do it, because even if she wanted to die herself, she didn’t want him to do it,” she hypothesizes. Many women who do murder their partners do so while the partner sleeps, says Schlesinger, and the “battered wife” defense is based on the idea that a woman who kills a sleeping man can still be acting in self-defense, as that's the only time she can safely fight back.

There is no evidence that McNair was abusive to Kazemi, of course, and women don’t just commit crime when they’re being abused. “Women commit all the same types of crime men do, just less frequently,” says Schlesinger. In fact, while the number of homicides committed by women has decreased in the past 20 years (as has the number of overall homicides), the number of women involved in other types of crime has increased.

When talking about Kazemi, however, Oyster suggests that discussing “women” and crime might be a misnomer. “Twenty-year-olds are not cognitive adults,” she says. “The decision making isn’t fully mature until about 24.” 

At 20, it’s illegal to purchase a weapon from a licensed gun dealer. But Kazemi purchased her gun from a private source, and Tennessee law permits those over 18 to carry a weapon. These types of unlicensed sales—and the lack of a central U.S. registry—makes it difficult to determine how many men own guns compared with women, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the women who do own guns are just as active and interested in firearms as their male counterparts.

“I teach women pistol handgun skills, and we’ve had to turn women away because we just don’t have enough instructors to deal with the demand,” says Oyster, who notes that women, like men, purchase guns to protect themselves, their homes, and their families—and warns that stereotypes about gender should not blind us to the capacity of female gun owners to perpetrate the same kinds of violence as men.