Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue.
Melody Plagman is pictured Friday in her home in Columbia. Her daughter, Asia, was shot in November 2019 and died two weeks later from pulmonary embolism. “She was so strong-willed and independent,” Melody Plagman said of her daughter.
Melody Plagman holds a picture of her daughter, Asia, in this portrait taken Friday in her home in Columbia. Plagman remembers her daughter’s long curly hair from the photo. Asia was 22 years old when she died.
Melody Plagman is pictured Friday in her home in Columbia. Her daughter, Asia, was shot in November 2019 and died two weeks later from pulmonary embolism. “She was so strong-willed and independent,” Melody Plagman said of her daughter.
Editor’s note: This is the first of two stories about intimate- partner violence and guns in Missouri. The second runs online Monday.
Asia Lenore Plagman was known for her sense of humor, big heart and fierce independence.
“She was a challenge from day one,” her mother, Melody Plagman, said with a laugh. “Even as a child, she was so strong-willed and independent, but it was really one of her biggest assets.”
Asia worked two jobs while going to school full time. She had plans to become a nurse and was working hard toward that goal.
“She was so determined,” Plagman said.
On Nov. 15, 2019, she was shot twice by her ex-boyfriend Deshawn Graves in her apartment on Jacobs Place, just south of East Broadway in east Columbia. Graves, 22, then turned the gun on himself, according to Columbia Police investigative reports.
Two weeks later, Asia died from a pulmonary embolism. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Guns are uniquely lethal weapons, and when it comes to intimate partner violence, the presence of a firearm can have deadly consequences for everyone involved, regardless of whose gun it is.
In recent years, Missouri lawmakers have continued to loosen the state’s gun restrictions, despite increases in gun death rates. Missouri has no law on intimate partner violence and firearms that parallels federal law.
Meanwhile, the state has the second-highest rate of men killing women in the country, just behind Alaska, according to the Violence Policy Center’s most recent study analyzing unpublished FBI crime data from 2018.
Where relationships could be identified, more than half of the victims were wives, ex-wives or girlfriends of the offender, and 80% of the women were killed with guns.
Melody Plagman holds a picture of her daughter, Asia, in this portrait taken Friday in her home in Columbia. Plagman remembers her daughter’s long curly hair from the photo. Asia was 22 years old when she died.
Graves and Asia both attended Battle High School, where they met. The two dated on and off for several years.
“She loved him, but she was tired of the stuff he was doing,” Plagman said.
Asia bought a gun because she had been robbed and it made her feel safer, her mother said. The night before the shooting, Graves, who had a job across the street, came to Asia’s apartment after work.
Before she died, Asia described to her mother what happened: On the morning of Nov. 15, she and Graves had an argument, and it “got physical,” Plagman said. To get Graves to leave, Asia grabbed her gun. He told her to put the gun down, so she did. Then he picked it up and shot her twice, once in the shoulder and once in the abdomen, before shooting himself.
Graves died that day from self-inflicted wounds, according to investigative reports. Asia was transported to University Hospital and had surgery for the bullet in her abdomen.
“I don’t think this would’ve happened if she didn’t have the gun in the house,” Plagman said.
While in recovery, Asia moved back in with her mother but longed to get back to some normalcy.
“I just don’t think she wanted to be a victim,” her mother said. “She wanted to put her life back together.”
In the days leading up to her death, Asia told her mother and doctors she had chest pain when she got up to walk around, but doctors attributed it to the gunshot wounds.
On November 29, at her Jacobs Place apartment where she’d gone to pick up a few belongings, she told a friend she wasn’t feeling well. Then she fell down some stairs and became “unresponsive,” according to investigative reports.
She was taken to University Hospital and pronounced dead. Her death was later ruled a homicide by Boone County Medical Examiner Dr. Carl Stacy.
Plagman described a moment she and her daughter shared in the hospital in the days after the shooting.
“She turned to me just out of the blue and said ‘I love you mom’,” Plagman said. “I’m grateful I got to have that time with her before she passed.”
Guns and intimate partner violence are deeply connected. Research shows women, who are disproportionately affected, are five times more likely to be killed if their abuser has access to firearms.
Guns don’t have to be fired to be an effective tool for abusers. The mere presence of a gun intensifies the power and control dynamic in abusive relationships. Perpetrators often use guns to injure, threaten or intimidate victims.
“The trend that emerges from data collected by state and national government entities, national resource centers and peer-reviewed academic research is clear,” said Matthew Huffman, public affairs director for the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.
“Women face the greatest threat from someone they know, most often a spouse or other intimate acquaintance, who is armed with a gun.”
When Janice Thompson returned to her Springfield home after a domestic violence incident in 2003, a gun with bullets beside it was sitting at the top of the stairs.
“I realized at that point, if I had not called police, or if I had come back (the night before), I’d be dead,” Thompson said.
Police failed to include in their report of the incident the fact that her husband, now her ex, had a gun. “They simply unloaded it and left it at the top of the stairs, with the bullets next to it,” she recalled.
Missouri has no state law that explicitly allows or requires the removal of firearms or ammunition from the scene of a domestic violence incident. Fourteen states, including Nebraska and Illinois, require law enforcement to remove at least some firearms from the scene of a domestic violence incident and six states authorize taking that action.
After the attack, Thompson obtained a protection order, which her husband, Greg Marvin, violated twice in two days. On one occasion, he threatened to burn the house down with Thompson and their two sons in it.
Marvin’s pattern of abusive behavior didn’t end after Thompson divorced him in 2007.
Marvin was already on probation for third-degree domestic assault from an incident involving Meese in 2015. An order of protection was active against him at the time of the shooting.
It wasn’t until Marvin was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison that he lost partial custody of the children he shared with Thompson.
Thompson, now a victims’ advocate who runs the Facebook page “Surviving Domestic Violence in Missouri,” said victims in the state are being drowned out in the argument over gun rights.
Unlike federal law, Missouri law does not prohibit those convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from possessing or purchasing firearms. Thirty-two states do, including neighbors Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Tennessee.
Missouri also does not restrict people with active protection orders against them from possessing or purchasing firearms.
Across the U.S., 28 states have laws facilitating the removal of firearms and ammunition by individuals subject to orders of protection.
Huffman said judges can call for the removal of firearms in certain cases. But the application of that measure is inconsistent across the state.
“There are judges who feel like they can’t really enforce it unless state law changes, and part of that is because getting local law enforcement to enforce it is also a big hurdle across the state,” he said.
Previously, citizens had to complete a firearm safety training course and pass a background check to obtain a permit from their local sheriff’s office to conceal and carry.
Eliminating the permit requirement opened what Rep. Tracy McCreery, D-Olivette, calls the “deadly domestic violence loophole,” which lawmakers even acknowledged at the time.
“There was an agreement at the time to go back and fix it,” McCreery said. “That was in 2016. It’s now 2021, and we still have not closed that deadly loophole.”
With no background check, the bill opened the door for people who would have previously been denied permits because of their criminal history to carry a concealed weapon.
While federal law prohibits those convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from having guns, domestic violence cases are prosecuted in state and local courts, which follow state and local law.
“We know in whatever category of the criminal code, you can’t just have federal law, there needs to be state law as well,” McCreery said. “It’s really critical that local law enforcement ... and prosecutors have corresponding state-level laws to protect victims and their children.”
Senate Bill 656 sponsor Brian Munzlinger, R-Williamstown, declined interview requests for this story. Co-sponsor Sen. Eric Burlison, R-Battlefield, said the previous permit requirement, which included a fee for the background check, put costs above the right to carry a firearm.
“You could own the firearm, you could carry it, you just couldn’t put it in your pocket or put your jacket over it ... unless you went and paid the sheriff for a background check, took a class and jumped through all these hoops,” he said. “Everyone knew that the whole thing was silly.”
“I think we all saw the potential that just about anybody who wanted one then would carry one, and I think that’s what we’ve seen,” Springfield Police Chief Paul Williams said.
Williams was the president of the Missouri Police Chiefs Association at the time of the bill’s passage. He said that while most gun owners in Missouri behave responsibly, some don’t take into account how dangerous guns can be. That creates problems for law enforcement.
“The increase in the number of firearm-related incidences, the number of shots-fired calls, the number of people shot and or killed with firearms has increased in the ensuing five years,” he said. “I know anecdotally, I’m comfortable with saying that the ease with which you can just decide to carry or have one available without a permit has increased those numbers.”
Recent research validates that laws allowing concealed handguns in public do not increase public safety. In fact, they have done the opposite.
A 2020 study from Violence Policy Center found concealed carry handgun permit holders in 40 states and the District of Columbia are responsible for at least 1,760 deaths, unrelated to self-defense, since 2007. Incidents are likely undercounted because there is no comprehensive record of deaths involving concealed carry permit holders.
An even earlier study of gun violence policy by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that Missouri’s 2007 repeal of its permit-to-purchase law, which required all handgun purchasers to obtain a license and pass a background check, was associated with a 25% increase in firearm homicides across the state.
Burlison, the legislator, sees a gun in a domestic violence situation as an equalizer between the female victim and an abuser.
“We know women are sexually assaulted more than men,” Burlison said. “If you’re a woman, a firearm benefits you much more because it empowers a woman to defend herself against a more physically dominant individual ... If you do anything to make it more difficult to gain or to possess a firearm, in my opinion, you’re really just exposing victims to individuals who are physically more capable of attacking them.”
Editor’s note: Katie’s name has been changed and certain identifiable characteristics have been omitted for her safety as the court case involving her ex-husband continues.
After Katie married her now ex-husband, the relationship began to change immediately.
Verbal and emotional abuse became a daily occurrence. When Katie would try to talk to her husband about what she needed from the marriage — like time together — arguments always followed.
“He did not like it when I asked for anything, that always started an argument,” she said.
At one point, he forbade her from using the word “needs.”
“That became a bad word in our house,” she said. “Whatever I felt I needed out of our marriage was completely unimportant, irrelevant, didn’t matter.”
He became increasingly controlling and would take her car keys away to stop her from leaving the house.
“I was like a shell of the person I once was, and this was just in 10 and a half or 11 months of marriage to him,” she said.
One morning when it all became too much, Katie decided to contact a divorce attorney. Her husband overheard the phone call and stormed into the kitchen holding a loaded revolver to his head, threatening to kill himself if she left.
Then, he turned the gun on Katie.
She sobbed and pleaded for him to put the gun down for what felt like forever, she said.
“I thought he was going to kill both of us. I thought I was going to die, I legitimately did,” Katie said.
He was charged with unlawful use of a weapon and misdemeanor domestic assault.
When Katie filed for an order of protection against him after their separation, her attorneys asked that he relinquish his weapons to the local sheriff’s office for the duration of the legal case.
Her husband told the judge he would give them to his family for safe keeping. The judge told him that was fine as long as he didn’t go get them.
“Nobody verifies that, nobody checks that,” Katie said. “He’s facing a weapons charge against me, and there’s no accountability or anything to see if he indeed still has guns in his possession or not.”
The prosecutor tried to persuade Katie repeatedly to agree to reduced charges against her ex-husband, despite the overwhelming evidence against him, telling her it was in her best interest.
In response, she dove into doing her own research and found a Department of Justice study that recommends maximum allowable sentencing because abusers have “a high likelihood of continuing abuse on the same or a different victim.”
Recently, Katie’s request to renew her order of protection against her ex-husband was denied. So she requested her case file. In it, she discovered her ex-husband had violated the previous order of protection more than 200 times in just under four months.
Katie has tried to bring those facts to the attention of a judge with zero success.
The experience shredded her mental health. She was diagnosed with severe depressive and post-traumatic stress disorders, according to medical records.
A recent study shows that women who have been threatened with a gun by an abuser — or feared they might be — suffered more severe PTSD symptoms than women who endured other types of abuse, even physical and sexual abuse.
Katie even contemplated taking her own life, a thought she never had before the marriage.
She’s on the highest daily dosage possible of a medication used to treat symptoms associated with PTSD. Still, the mental health consequences were so severe that she had to leave her job as a counselor.
“I have a master’s degree, and I deliver for Doordash because I couldn’t work due to my PTSD,” she said. “Because of my field, being in counseling, there were too many things that were too closely related and were triggering for me.”
Despite roadblocks at every turn, she continues to fight for justice in court.
“This isn’t about me, this isn’t about me seeking revenge,” she said. “The point is, how is anything going to change unless people are held accountable?”
I'm the public safety and health editor at the Missourian and a professor in the School of Journalism. I'm experienced in directing investigative projects. Call me at (573) 882-1792 with story tips, ideas or complaints.
Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily!
Your notification has been saved.
There was a problem saving your notification.
{{description}}
Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.
