Utah domestic violence is called an epidemic

More people were listed as having died as a result of domestic violence last year in Utah than ever before, according to a report released Thursday.

The Utah Department of Health report said that 10 men and 11 women died at the hands of intimate partners, friends or family members in 2005, and 44 others committed suicide soon after a domestic-violence incident.

The numbers were a threefold increase from the department's most recent data, reported in 2002. However, the new report for the first time included suicides resulting from domestic violence-related cases.

Teresa Brechlin, intentional injury prevention coordinator for the UDOH, said the numbers are "staggering," and she called domestic-violence-related suicides an "epidemic" in Utah.

"It triples the number of domestic violence-related fatalities," Brechlin said. "We didn't have any idea that the number of fatalities were that high."

The reason for the change in reporting was the department's receiving a new federal grant that provided means to access the 2005 cases of suicide and domestic violence, which had never before been looked at concurrently.

Suicides are considered to be domestic violence-related if one of the circumstances surrounding the suicide involved violence or the threat of violence between intimate partners, family members or roommates.

Intimate partners were involved in 42 percent of the overall deaths related to domestic violence, while 33 percent were other family members and 25 percent were acquaintances, such as friends or roommates.

Ned Searle, director of the Governor's Office of Violence Against Women and Families, said the numbers are not a big surprise because nearly half of Utah's homicides stem from violence at home.

"People need to see how pervasive this is in our community," he said. The idea that such problems don't exist, and the silence associated with them, he said, need to be squelched.

Circumstances surrounding the homicides were varied and included lovers' triangles, arguments over money or property, mercy killings and mental illness. In some instances, the report said, the victim was killed while trying to intervene on behalf of another person.

Of the 44 people who committed suicide related to domestic violence in 2005, 42 were male and two were female. Sixty-four percent of those suicides were committed by firearms, 20 percent were by hanging and 7 percent were the result of poisonings, the report says.