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The bride
dressed in red

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By Elke Kreutzer
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On that fateful day, September 26, 1999, Gladys Ricart was finishing the last details of her bridal gown; she was feeling that, after a stormy relationship of seven years with a cruel and violent man, she had reached, at last, the day in which her true happiness was going to begin. The groom, James Preston Jr., was waiting for his bride at the altar, and she was unable to separate herself from the marvelous life waiting for her.

Suddenly, a man impeccably dressed arrived at the house, deliberately took a gun from a portfolio and made five shots against the bride. The joyous bride fell on a pool of her own blood, her white gown was painted in red and her assassin, Agustin Garcia, the same man with whom she had shared seven years of a terrible relationship, a Dominican with powerful connections in the area of Washington Heights, important center of activities for the numerous Dominican community of New York, was jumped and detained by the bride's brother and other members of the family until the arrival of police.

One could say that this is only one more of the thousands of murders of women occurring, daily, in almost all cities and countries. It is only a statistical datum of this horrific collective crime that receives the name of gender violence.

Five years after Gladys death, her murderer attempts to justify his abominable action as an act of love and desperation, because the woman he loved had committed treason in marrying another man. The prosecutors have asked for capital punishment for Garcia, because he acted with premeditation, perfidy, abuse of strength and used a gun; but his lawyers allege extenuating circumstances of extreme pain and try to transform a cold blooded murder in a crime of passion, for which the punishment is 5 to 10 years, with a possible parole after 2 ½ years.

Males who are near them, generally the husband, boyfriend, lover or one of the exes, perpetrate the majority of murders in which the victims are women. Three of every four murders committed inside the home are against women. In 1996, according to the FBI Crime Report, 840 thousand women in the U.S.A were victims of some kind of violent crime perpetrated by members of their immediate family or by near friends of the victim. In New York, her friend, beau, husband or lover attacks every 12 minutes one woman. In the last year, 4 Dominican women have been murdered in Washington Heights by their spouses. These are real data, not speculations on the goodness or malice of women.

But the single statistical datum has acquired a dramatic quality, because in the first anniversary of her death, a Miami woman Josie Ashton, flew to New York, donned her wedding gown and began a trek from Washington Heights to Florida, with the intention of awakening the collective conscience about the serious consequences of gender violence.

Every September 26, New York women and women in other cities, including Miami, organize walks, dressed as brides, to remember Gladys Ricart, but also to manifest their protest against a serious situation of physical, psychological and judicial abuses against women, perpetrated only because of their gender and not for other reasons, these abuses are attenuated and even justified by a sexist doctrine permitting the aggressors to allege love of the defense of their honor as a means of masking their crimes.

For society, a free murderer is as dangerous as the strategy of defense in which the massacred women are guilty. A weak law and the capacity to manipulate media and, consequently, the juries, are the most powerful base for the perpetration of violence against women. It is ludicrous that the argument for the defense could be the right to kill. This is the legalization of murder.

The strategy of transforming the victim in the guilty party -traitorous and double dealers- as in many barroom songs, and the male as the “macho” who has the god given right to clean with bullets his soiled honor, his diminished pride or his pain of rejection, can be effective with certain juries, maybe with part of public opinion, but it doesn't serve the interests of truth nor justice, and it doesn't contribute in restricting the murdering of women, even if is for the cause of love.

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