SAN ANTONIO – As a part of the series One Voice 1,000 Stories, KSAT is digging to find out how local agencies are taking on domestic violence.
The Bexar County district attorney is one local leader who wants to improve the way his office handles family violence cases.
Kisha Ward, a domestic violence survivor, recently shared her story of abuse at the hands of the father of her children.
"He would slap me, he would grab me by my neck, he would throw keys and hit me in the face, I have a scar here," Ward said.
That was just the beginning. Three years later, the man shot her in the neck, leaving her a quadriplegic.
"I immediately lost all feeling and sensation at the bottom of my body and I just saw him run by," Ward said.
Wanted for attempted murder, he turned himself in and, 10 years later, is still in prison.
For that Ward said she is thankful, but the process has shown her how much work needs to be done to combat domestic violence at the criminal justice level.
"We're so backlogged from years and years of inefficiencies," said Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood.
To fix that, LaHood said he has created a new task force of trained prosecutors to deal specifically with felony domestic violence cases. Those are many of the cases that are backlogged.
Then, there are the lesser cases, which he said could be dealt with in several different ways.
"If someone is abusing an adult or child, they need to be held accountable," LaHood said. "We have the most severe cases where people need to go to prison. Then we have those cases where maybe they need some guidance."
For those lesser cases, LaHood believes that counseling offenders early on could stop them from becoming felony abusers, like the one who almost ended Ward's life.
"I think that would have helped probably me (and) so many before me (and) it would help those in the future," Ward said.
LaHood is currently looking at data on repeat offender rates to see which intervention programs work the best for those first- and second-time abusers. Once he chooses which ones to use, he will implement them, he said.
He said these types of intervention programs are not mandated across the board.
"It just depends on each individual judge," LaHood said. "That's why we need to have a consensus. (The programs) should be mandated as a condition of probation through a judge or through the plea bargain process."
Ward said if current cases are taken care of faster, and abusers receive intervention early on, the result would be great.
"You could be saving someone's life. Theirs, or the person they will be abusing in the future," she said.