Randy Wood knew his daughter, Brianna, would never leave her two toddlers alone in their home. She would never leave her children, not even, Wood says, to walk the 75 or so feet between the front door of her Cave Creek town home and the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

So on July 4, when Wood received a call telling him his grandchildren had been spotted alone on their balcony by neighbors swimming in the nearby pool, his mood quickly changed from anger to worry as he began to sense something had gone terribly wrong.

“I remember calling her cell phone and leaving her a message saying, ‘What’s wrong with you?’” Wood said in a recent phone interview. “I was actually a little annoyed with her, thinking she had left the boys.”

In a matter of hours, Wood would experience a gamut of emotions ranging from annoyance to rage and finally grief, after learning that Brianna, his bubbly and generous-spirited daughter, had been found dead, slumped over in the rear of her GMC Envoy, and that her boyfriend, 23-year-old Ryan John Chronis, stood accused of her murder.

Chronis was arrested after being pulled over by police for speeding in Rocky Point, Mexico. During the stop, police noticed a bloody sheet in the back of the vehicle. According to police reports, officials believe  the crime occurred inside Brianna's home, likely while her two young sons looked on. The most recent hearing in the case was scheduled for Aug. 29. Wood is hoping Chronis will express at the least, a small amount of remorse.

In choosing Chronis, Randy Wood said his daughter made a serious misstep.

“This time it cost her life.”

Disturbing Trend

Across Arizona and the nation, law enforcement officials, educators and psychologists say victims of domestic violence are increasingly young women, many still in high school and even junior high.

A report by the U.S. Department of Justice, released in 2000, revealed women ages 16 to 24 suffer the highest per capita rate of domestic violence in the U.S. In the Valley, a Maricopa Association of Governments study found more than half of Valley teens reported having been victims of domestic violence themselves, or of having known someone who had been victimized. And while experts say the physical escalation from kicking and hitting to murder generally takes years, news reports show this sobering dynamic may be changing as well.

In February, Gilbert police arrested Jonathan Burns, 25, in connection with the shooting death of Jackie Hartman, 19, a young woman Burns had met only days earlier at a local gas station. In July, Palm Beach County, Florida authorities arrested Jason Shenfeld, 26, after the lifeless body of his girlfriend, 18-year-old Amanda Buckley, a standout softball star from well-heeled Palm Beach Gardens, was found in Shenfeld’s closet.

“Do you now understand, you daughters out there, why we fathers are the way we are?” veteran Palm Beach Post columnist Randy Schulz recently wrote for the Aug. 5 edition of that paper. “Do you now understand why, when we ask whom you’re going out with, ‘some guy’ is not an acceptable answer?”

And just last month, John Mullarkey Jr., 18, stabbed to death his girlfriend Demi Cuccia, a high school cheerleader, just one day shy of her 16th birthday. He later committed suicide by slitting his own throat after what friends and family described as a tumultuous two-year relationship Cuccia’s mother had forbidden her from continuing.

The trend has so alarmed local municipal and law enforcement officials that a press conference designed to help both parents and teens recognize the signs of an abuser, as well as someone who is being abused, has been slated for late September, in time for the beginning of National Domestic Violence Awareness month.

“We’ve always known this was happening,” said Doreen Nicholas, a training coordinator with the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “But in the late ‘90s, with the whole O.J. Simpson trial [on charges that he killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson], there was general increased awareness about domestic violence, and recently we moved that into the schools as well.”

If society is looking for reasons behind the rising tide of violence, experts say, there are plenty of places to fix the blame. The usual suspects are typically mentioned: A nation obsessed with violent video games and movies which include sexually degrading images of women; pop starlets who seem to live each day of their drug- and alcohol-addled young lives with little or no adult guidance; and exposure to a media rife with images of inconsequential casual relationships.

In addition, social venues where young people can clandestinely meet one another without giving their parents an opportunity to know their potential friends and partners are adding to parental difficulties.

MySpace, Friendster and Facebook all offer a chance for young men and women to be introduced, get together and form close relationships – often before they are emotionally prepared for them – and without adult supervision.

It’s What You Don’t Know

Randy Wood thought he had at least one of those problems solved.

Ryan Chronis, while not a regular fixture at Wood’s Phoenix home, was someone he thought he had gotten to know well enough to trust with his daughter.

“He wasn’t over a lot, but he was here for Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas and we had conversations. He was just starting to open up,” Wood recalled. “I felt good about this one. He was very cordial ... seemed like the all-American boy.”

A year earlier, Brianna had met Chronis at a car wash. Despite being romantically involved with John Wilhelm, the father of her youngest son – and after warnings about the dangers presented by the love triangle she might be forming – Brianna elected to pursue the relationship, eventually moving in with Chronis.

“She liked the fact that he was very spontaneous. If you decided in two seconds that there was somewhere you wanted to go, he would go. Her other boyfriend wasn’t like that,” said Jessica Caslake, 22, Brianna’s cousin, who at just eight months her junior was a constant companion to Brianna. The two talked almost daily about Brianna’s children and her ever-changing career plans and had agreed that when Caslake had children, they would grow up alongside Brianna’s, just as the two cousins had.

 “I remember telling her it just wasn’t a good idea to date [both Wilhelm and Chronis]. She needed to end the first relationship,” said Caslake.

Chronis had a far more difficult time winning over Caslake and other members of the Wood family. From her first meeting with Chronis, Caslake said she felt something was amiss, recalling Chronis as fidgety and rarely looking her or other family members in the eye.

“At first I thought he was an OK guy, but he couldn’t seem to sit still. That always seemed weird to me,” she said.

Brianna’s grandmother also noticed Chronis’ lack of eye contact with others and mentioned it, along with Chronis’ apparent possessiveness of Brianna, to Randy Wood.

Wood said his mother complained that each time Brianna so much as left the room without Chronis, he became upset. Brianna’s younger sister, Leandra, says she found Chronis “cocky.” But Wood dismissed his family’s misgivings since he, himself, felt comfortable with the young man.

Chronis, he said, offered up all the things any father dreaming about a secure future for his daughter and grandchildren would want to hear.

“He wrote her love letters. She was talking about marrying this one, and he was saying things like he wanted her to quit her job and be a stay-at-home mom. He was going to take care of everything,” said Wood.

But Chronis’ image as the slightly-tarnished Boy Scout to the Wood family slowly changed over ensuing months after the family – and eventually Brianna – suspected that he had been using crack cocaine.

Just days before her death, Brianna admitted to her family that Chronis was planning to go into a rehabilitation program, and while she seemed ambivalent about her role as caretaker for Chronis, she had planned to stick by him.

“The Saturday before it all happened, she said to me, ‘I can’t stay with him. It’s like I’m watching him kill himself, and I can’t leave him like that,’ ’’ Caslake said. “She didn’t want to be with him, but she wanted to help him.”

Like other young female victims, it may have been Brianna’s well-known compassion that ultimately led to her demise, said Dr. Stephanie Buehler, a licensed psychologist and director of the Irvine-California-based Buehler Institute.

“Drug addicts and alcoholics have a kind of radar for nice women because they know they aren’t going to be challenged,” Buehler said. “It’s a very unconscious thing, but they seek out someone who is a nurturer and a caregiver. We need to start teaching young women that alcoholism and drug addictions are deal breakers in a relationship, especially when the person hasn’t sought treatment. Even if they have, you are still taking a risk; but if they haven’t, it really should be a deal breaker.”

Drawing the Line with Respect

Others experts believe there are too many things society hasn’t taught young women – or young men for that matter – about relationships, including how to choose a suitable mate or how to be one.

“Draw the line at respect,’’ says Kay Reed, president of the Dibble Institute, a foundation focusing on relationship education for teens. “Don’t stop it after the first shove or the first hit. Draw the line at respect. Look at how the whole relationship has evolved. Does he call on time? Does he show up late?”

Reed’s organization has taken its curriculum to middle and high schools across the nation, including many in Arizona, teaching young people that relationships – like athletics and academics – are skills-based challenges, and the ability to form a healthy one can be practiced and learned.

“We have to teach kids not simply what to avoid, but what to go for,” Reed said. “They need to learn how to identify problem people. We have to start early because by the time they are in their teens and 20s, the patterns have already been set.”

By not teaching children relationship skills in schools, Reed said the patterns that parents fear and that can ultimately leave young people in precarious situations are set mostly by mimicking pop culture role models who bounce from relationship to relationship, flaunting an unbridled sexuality along with a disdain for the rest of society’s rules.

“So many of these women encourage very poor boundary-setting,” Buehler said of the Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears set. “In my day, it seemed that the women who were considered sexy, well, they were kind of hard to get. You had to be really special to get their attention. Now it’s like the women have to do something special to get the attention.”

Outwardly, this didn’t appear to be the case for Brianna. She was a well-liked young woman with dreams of pursuing a nursing career and scores of friends, many of whom have turned her MySpace page into a virtual memorial with messages about late-night conversations and regrets of unfulfilled planned get-togethers.

“I wake up every day extremely happy. I believe that everything happens in life for a reason. I want my true friends to know that I love them and they make me stronger every day,” Brianna wrote before her death.

Wood admitted to wishing he hadn’t been quite so reluctant to delve more deeply into his young adult daughter’s relationship. As he prepares for months of hearings and Chronis’ trial on second-degree murder charges, he says he hopes other parents don’t make the same mistake.

“You know you don’t want to pry,” Wood said. “But now you know, you want to dissect everything. It’s all just a big nightmare, and I wish I could just wake up and it will be all over. Tell your children every day you love them. The only way I can tell Brianna I love her now is to kiss her picture.”

www.dibblefund.org
www.azcadv.org
www.myspace.com/ripbrianna