Latricia Green—A Domestic Murder in Detroit

Sep 1, 2025

On August 22^nd, Latricia Green was shot to death by her ex-husband at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, where she had been employed for over 20 years.

Green had gone to court twice to get a personal protection order (PPO) against him because she AND even some of her co-workers had been confronted and harassed by him repeatedly at her workplace.

In June, she was denied a PPO because the judge had stated she hadn’t met the burden of proof—all the while the harassment continued.

In her July 20 petition she wrote: “I am asking for help before this goes too far, and things are too late.” On that same day she wrote: “I have tried being cordial because I feel that the system has now let me down each time that I have tried to make reports on this man….”

And while her petition was granted a day later by the same Wayne County Judge who had denied her June petition, the Sheriff’s office said it has no record of Green contacting its office to ask to serve the PPO—for it’s in Michigan that the burden lies on the victim to pay for the order to be served!

She was killed a month later.

According to the director of law and policy at the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence, “Ms. Green did everything we as a society ask of victims. She asked for help. She begged for help. She went to court, she said ‘please help me’…. She did everything right, and she still paid the ultimate price.”

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), an average of over 1,000 women are killed by an intimate partner—husband, or ex-husband, boyfriend or ex- boyfriend—in the U.S. each year.

But there are many more horrifying statistics: The National Domestic Violence Hotline indicates that over 1 in 3 women in the U.S. have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Worldwide, according to U.N. Women, 140 women and girls on average are killed each day by an intimate partner or family member.

In the case of Latricia Green, you can say that the system failed her.

But you can also say that it’s the system itself that puts women in dangerous situations—domestic violence against women is part and parcel of the social fabric of this society, where women are denigrated, where their labor is exploited, where they can be treated like the private property of men—at home, or at work.

And it’s a system where some men can act on this most violent attitude and practice toward women and resort to murder.