Milwaukee County's Domestic Violence High Risk Team staffed 1,685 cases in 2025 — a 113% jump from the 791 cases it handled in 2019 — as strangulation incidents continue to drive some of the county's most dangerous domestic violence situations. Strangulation was identified as the primary risk factor in 194 of those cases, according to new reporting that also revisits a 2024 homicide the team's partners had already flagged as high risk.
A Caseload That Has More Than Doubled
The twice-weekly team brings together police, prosecutors, probation agents and social service providers to review the county's most dangerous domestic violence cases and craft recommendations meant to protect victims, according to FOX6 News Milwaukee. Repeat cases — meaning at least one person involved had previously been flagged as high-risk — made up a third of the team's 2025 caseload, the station separately reported in its coverage of the team's broader death-prevention efforts.
Over the past eight years, Milwaukee County prosecutors have charged more than 2,000 strangulation cases, the outlet's reporting states. Research published in 2008 found that men who strangle their partners are seven-and-a-half times more likely to go on to commit a homicide than other abusers — a statistic that underscores why advocates consider strangulation such a critical warning sign in abusive relationships.
A Scoring Gap in the Risk Assessment Tool
Much of the tension in the reporting centers on how strangulation gets weighed in the screening tool used to flag dangerous cases. The Lethality Assessment Program survey used in Milwaukee assigns strangulation just one point, the same report notes. By contrast, materials from Wisconsin LAP describe strangulation as one of three questions in the newer LAP 2.0 version that can automatically trigger the protocol's highest level of risk on its own, regardless of how other questions are answered.
Wisconsin LAP materials also note that when an officer's screening indicates high danger, the officer still calls the local domestic violence hotline even if the survivor initially declines to speak with an advocate. As of September, the program says it has trained advocates and law enforcement personnel in 51 of Wisconsin's 72 counties plus six tribal nations, though that figure does not, by itself, establish full countywide implementation everywhere those trainings occurred.
The Case That Still Haunts the System
The reporting also traces back to Jerrod and Tomitka Stewart, a case that illustrates how a seemingly strong legal response can still end in tragedy. A family court commissioner had found a “substantial risk” that Jerrod would eventually kill Tomitka and imposed a 10-year no-contact order — yet the criminal court judge overseeing the case set Jerrod free on $5,000 cash bail, per the same FOX6 account.
On April 2, 2024, Stewart's GPS bracelet tracked him inside the zone he was barred from entering. Justice Point, the pre-trial services contractor responsible for monitoring him, logged the violation — but the report says nothing else happened as a result. According to court records cited in the reporting, the violation report wasn't filed until April 17, the same day police found Tomitka with stab wounds.
Pushing for a Better Tool
The Milwaukee County Domestic Violence High Risk Team is now working with the Medical College of Wisconsin to explore developing a county-specific lethality assessment tool, according to the station's reporting — an acknowledgment that the current scoring system may not be catching every warning sign it should. The team can only formally review strangulation cases in which the victim passed out or lost bodily function, a narrower threshold than some advocates would like to see.
The scale of the problem extends beyond any single case. A separate account from the USC Center for Health Journalism found that from 2017 through 2022, the team took on more than 4,100 cases and managed to prevent an offender from killing the victim in all but one of them. That same reporting described a multidisciplinary pilot in Milwaukee Police District 4 that began responding to domestic-abuse calls one day a week specifically to connect victims with services more quickly.
