There Oughta be a Law. Or Should There?
Ronnie Bass said he continues to mourn over Pheonecia Ratliff, whom he described as his closest friend. He said he believes Jamarquis Black killed Ratlif, his ex-girlfriend, because he "couldn't handle rejection." MCIR
By Ann Marie Cunningham
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
CANTON — As a survivor of domestic violence, Pheonecia Ratliff did almost everything right.
She contacted the police. She filed domestic violence charges against her abuser. She filed stalking charges. Her abuser was given a no-contact order.
But she never got her day in court.
This photo shows a photo of Pheonecia Ratliff with her daughter, Jordyn, taken a little over a year ago that was placed on Pheonecia's grave. Ann Marie Cunningham/MCIR
Violence is the punctuation mark
About 50 to 75 percent of domestic violence homicides take place after a couple separates.
“The most dangerous time for women is when they decide to leave,” said Kit Gruelle, a nationwide activist for domestic violence victims and police trainer.
Once those women decide to stand up against their abusers and file charges, it’s even more dangerous, she said. “Any time a domestic violence victim exercises any kind of agency, the abuser views that as ‘she is defying me.’ In his mind, she’s fair game for him to assert himself in any way he chooses.”
That includes murder, Gruelle said. “Violence is the punctuation mark. It’s what he turns to when the other tactics fail.”
Pheonecia Ratliff, 23, had met Jamarquis Black, 24, in high school, and they remained a couple for about eight years. He spent many nights with Pheonecia and her family, her mother and four siblings. Pheonecia continued to juggle two jobs -- at Subway and Walmart -- and her studies of early-childhood education at Jackson State University. She was scheduled to graduate in December 2020 and planned to find a teaching job, because of her love for children.
There was a “drastic change” in the couple’s relationship early in 2019 when Pheonecia discovered she was pregnant, said her mother, Suzanne Ratliff. Jamarquis did not want the baby, but Pheonecia did. After the couple’s daughter, Jordyn, was born in November 2019, Jamarquis told Pheonecia she had “trapped” him with a baby.
He began to use the new baby as a pawn, Suzanne recalled. If he and Pheonecia had an argument, he would leave for his father’s place in the country around Canton, taking Jordyn with him. He would stay there with the baby until Pheonecia had placated him. He repeatedly denigrated her: “You’ve been in school long enough.”
He told her if she didn’t do as he wanted within the week and give him the baby, he would ‘finish it’ for her
In October 2020, the theme of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s annual conference was abuse of Black women.
Executive Director Ruth Glenn, a survivor herself, said intimate abuse has too often been a secret in the Black community — and a deadly one for victims that may include their own children and other family members.
She said many Black women hesitate to report their abuse to the police. They may not trust the police, or they don’t want to see their partners arrested and become another Black man behind bars.
Pheonecia Ratliff did not keep secret what was happening between her and Jamarquis. He stalked her, following her car, checking that she was in a classroom at Jackson State, and even climbing up the front of her family home in Canton to watch her while she slept.
By spring 2020, she had broken off with him, but they had been arguing because he wanted custody of Jordyn. On April 28, 2020, he entered the Subway restaurant on Canton’s town square, where Pheonecia was working. He had a gun. He told her if she didn’t do as he wanted within the week and give him the baby, he would “finish it” for her.
Outside Subway, Pheonecia flagged down a police officer, something many abused women of color avoid because they may not trust authorities or fear officers might harm their partners. Jamarquis was arrested, and his gun confiscated.
Pheonecia carried on with her life, juggling her jobs, her studies and Jordyn with help from her mother. She even belonged to a sorority, and her sorors loved her.
‘Has he ever used a weapon against you or threatened you with a weapon?’
Canton police lacked a tool that Byram Police Chief Luke Thompson had been using. A decade ago, he attended a conference on domestic violence, and it changed the way he approached the crime. He learned about the Danger Assessment, a one-page quiz developed for victims in 1985 by sociologist Jacqueline Campbell at Johns Hopkins.
Adding one new question, Thompson gave the sheet to his officers who respond to calls about domestic violence. The first question is “Has he ever used a weapon against you or threatened you with a weapon?” But if a victim answers “yes,” to any of the first three questions, the officer hands the victim a cellphone with an advocate on the other end of the line.
If Canton had used Thompson’s approach, a version of one advocated by the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety, Pheonecia and her daughter might have found shelter in a safe house. Today, the entrance to the Canton Police Department features posters in English and Spanish advertising the number for the Center for Violence Prevention in Pearl, which offers “30-day emergency shelter.”
Pheonecia’s family home. Jamarquis climbed up here to spy through her bedroom window. Ann Marie Cunningham/MCIR
Homicide steals the lives of more young Black women like Pheonecia than anything except accidents like car crashes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Johns Hopkins sociologist Campbell, a leading scholar of domestic violence, said intimate partners carry out more than half of these killings. In three-fourths of these deaths, the man physically abused the woman before killing her.
Campbell’s Danger Assessment study found that women threatened with a gun were 20 times more likely to be killed. In a study a decade ago, the CDC concluded that Mississippi had the worst rate of gun homicides of women in the nation. To date, the state trails only Alaska in gun deaths per capita.
Since the onset of the pandemic, the risk in Mississippi to women and children has gotten worse. Gun sales have spiked. In Jackson, the state capital, the 2020 homicide rate was higher than ever before.
Domestic violence victims are five times more likely to be killed when their abuser has access to a gun, according to the Giffords Law Center. Jamarquis was a gun owner.
On May 11, 2020, Jamarquis bailed out of jail for $15,000, the standard bond in Madison County, where Canton is located, for his charges of domestic violence and felony stalking. He only would have had to put up $1,500, in cash or property. If one of his parents put up property, he would have owed nothing. Before he left his cell, a judge spoke to him over the phone, and told him he could not contact Pheonecia, nor could he purchase or possess a firearm, under pain of returning to jail.
The evening of May 14, Jamarquis sped to the Ratliff family home in Canton, surrounded by large “No Trespassing” signs. He hid behind a tree, and when Pheonecia arrived home from her late shift at Walmart, he grabbed her at gunpoint in the driveway.
The night of May 14, Suzanne Ratliff was standing on her front porch, as she had done every evening to make sure her daughter got inside her door safely. Instead, she witnessed her daughter’s kidnapping. Pheonecia’s younger sister, 21-year old Alexandria, tried to stop Jamarquis. Suzanne also witnessed Jamarquis shoot her younger daughter in the thigh.
As Alexandria clutched her bleeding leg, Jamarquis forced Pheonecia into his car with his gun and fled with her.
‘I want you to know I love you, Mom’
Driveway where Jamarquis kidnapped Pheonecia. Her mother Suzanne witnessed it from the top of the stairs at back. Ann Marie Cunningham/MCIR
In most states, domestic violence is a misdemeanor. In Mississippi, prosecutors face the difficult task of having to convict an abuser three times before his crime can be classified as a felony, and his firearms confiscated. But under federal law, if a victim has secured an order of protection against her abuser, his firearms must be confiscated. Pheonecia did not go to court for an order of protection.
Canton police say they did not return Jamarquis’ gun, but did not produce any documentation. Jamarquis could have gone to a friend or relative willing to loan him another gun.
Around 6 a.m. on May 15, 2020, Suzanne got a call from Jamarquis, who had been driving Pheonecia across Mississippi all night as police tracked his cellphone. He sounded nervous. He told Suzanne to take baby Jordyn to his aunt’s home in Canton.
Suzanne believed that his request meant that in exchange for his daughter, he would release Pheonecia. When Suzanne arrived at his aunt’s house, she was startled to see his mother, Elizabeth Black-Wooten, who lived a two-hour drive away in Nesbit. “I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth stuttered. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Since Suzanne couldn’t do anything else to help her daughter, she went to work at Subway on Canton’s central town square, where she was on the early shift. Around noon, on her break, she got a call from Pheonecia. She was crying. “I want you to know I love you, Mom,” Phoenicia told her. “I love you all.”
Suzanne told her daughter she loved her, too. Then the call was ended suddenly.
Not long afterward, Suzanne says a police officer came into Subway. (The police report says the officer beckoned to her to come outside onto the sidewalk.) He told her that Jamarquis had done as he had threatened and “finished it.” He had shot Pheonecia in the head before killing himself.
Suzanne fell to her knees, sobbing and screaming,“She’s dead!”
Tragedy gives birth to Operation Phoenecia domestic violence task force
When Mike Hurst, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, heard about what had happened to Pheonecia, he knew he could no longer stand by. From his office in Jackson, he called Suzanne Ratliff. In September 2020, Hurst, who has six daughters, created a domestic violence task force named Operation Pheonecia, and he named Thompson, the Byram police chief, as one of the members.
Hurst persuaded the U.S. Department of Justice to invest $6 million into fighting domestic violence in Mississippi. The state Department of Health received $2.2 million to support those working with victims of domestic violence. Another $2.1 million went to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians to fund a tribal prosecutor to pursue domestic violence, bolster the tribal justice system, and provide services for victims of sexual assault.
On May 15, one year after she was killed, Pheonecia’s friends and family gathered at Suzanne’s invitation for a memorial at the Onisha Burks Memory Gardens Cemetery, an ancient Black cemetery in Canton with huge shade trees.
Mourners stood around Pheonecia’s new headstone, wearing purple t-shirts and bracelets to honor her. They hugged Suzanne and recalled Pheonecia as kind and friendly, a smile beaming across her face. “She was a big ol’ ray of sunshine,” recalled her friend, Ronnie Bass.
Pheonecia Ratliff’s grave a year after her ex-boyfriend took her life and his own. Ann Marie Cunningham/MCIR
For Suzanne, the tragedy has been doubly painful. She has barely seen her granddaughter, Jordyn, now 2 ½, since she dropped her off at Jamarquis’ aunt’s home a year ago. She said Jarmarquis’s mother wouldn’t allow Jordyn to attend Pheonecia’s funeral or the memorial.
Jordyn now lives in Nesbit with her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Black-Wooten, who has filed for guardianship. She has petitioned successfully to have the case moved from Madison to DeSoto County. Suzanne has a lawyer and plans to fight for joint custody.
As U.S. attorney, Mike Hurst set out to educate Mississippi’s prosecutors and judges about the federal law that deprives abusers of firearms. He advocated using a tactic employed by civil rights lawyers in the 1960s, moving cases to federal courts to ensure that abusers’ firearms are confiscated. He frequently made speeches to persuade police to arrest abusers, and district attorneys and judges to prosecute them. Too often in Mississippi, overworked prosecutors prefer not to take misdemeanor domestic violence cases to court.
However, domestic violence isn’t in the same class as a misdemeanor like shoplifting. Although Hurst is no longer U.S. attorney and Thompson has retired, the task force named for Pheonecia continues to work to take guns out of the hands of abusers like Jamarquis Black. If the 2021 Violence Against Women Act passes the Senate, U.S. attorneys will have new tools with which to confiscate guns from those guilty of domestic violence. [See Ann Marie’s column this week for more on domestic violence and guns.]
As the press conference announcing Operation Pheonecia wrapped up, Hurst asked Suzanne to share her thoughts. Stepping in front of reporters, she urged anyone in a violent relationship to leave. Now.
“Get out at the first sign,” she said. “No matter how you may think a person will change, they will not. It may start off verbally and end up physically. It doesn’t get better, it only gets worse. Get out at the first signs.”
Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who is working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. This story was published with the support of a fellowship from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights. Contact Cunningham at amc@mississippicir.org.