The End of The World as I knew it

The heartbreaking loss of her daughter gave Susann Montgomery-Clark a new life's mission: to educate other women about the subtle signs of domestic abuse.

- By Heather Buckner

The first time I meet Susann Montgomery-Clark to talk about her daughter Megan's murder, a kitchen timer interrupts us and Susann rushes away from our Zoom call to pull a casserole out of the oven. She comes back into the frame and apologizes; she's making the meal for her daughter Meredith. It's great to have both girls in town, she says, then catches herself. Before Megan died on December 1, 2019, at the hands of her husband, she lived a quick drive from her mother. Nearly three years later, Susann is still adjusting to the fact that she can't invite her younger daughter over for dinner.

Susann says Megan began dying on July 23, 2017-the day she went on her first date with police officer Jason McIntosh, the beginning of a relationship that would end 861 days later after a string of escalating altercations and 911 calls-with McIntosh fatally shooting her in a parking lot 20 miles from the home they had shared. Over the years, Megan had done what abused women are told to do: She'd reported him to his own police department; she'd filed for protection from abuse and for divorce; she'd moved out; she'd pursued domestic violence charges. Still, the system failed her, through a cascading series of events, each triggering the next.

But Megan's story is not unique: More than a quarter of homicides in the U.S. are related to domestic violence, according to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (EFSGV). When an abusive partner has access to a firearm, as McIntosh did, a domestic violence victim is five times as likely to be killed, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.