The family member of a murdered woman in New Britain, Connecticut, wants her alleged killer charged with double homicide for killing both her and her preborn child.
According to Fox 61, 27-year-old Moenisha Collins was shot to death on December 1 —allegedly by her boyfriend, 47-year-old Vincent Blair, who fled the state and was captured the following day at a motel in Pennsylvania.
Shortly before she was killed, Collins had learned she was pregnant with Blair’s child and her sister said she had recently expressed wanting to end her relationship with him because of verbal abuse.
Hours after Collins’ funeral, her family faced Blair in court.
Blair, who has an extensive criminal history, told police he is “responsible for whatever they had him in there for.” He is being held on $5 million bond and is due back in court on January 3. Despite Collins’ pregnancy, Blair is only being charged with her murder, not the murder of their child. Her family is not satisfied with the single murder charge.
Rev. Deborah Copeland, a family member of Collins, said, “I think they should give him double homicide. I don’t know where they were going with one because those were two people.”
NBC News said police expressed that they would consider adding a second murder charge once they received Collins’ autopsy report.
Copeland also called on action to be taken to stop domestic violence. “Domestic violence is real,” she said. “And unless we start showing that we don’t give them any consideration, we are going to be the ones losing our daughters by gunshots.”
Collins was also the mother to a 10-year-old daughter, who found her mother dead after she returned home from school.
Justina Collins, Moenisha’s sister, said the little girl “just misses her mom. She’s a strong little girl and she’s doing the best that she can but her mother was taken from her in a tragic and horrible way and she has to see it. She was the first one to see it.”
Homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women in the United States. Women in the U.S. are more likely to be murdered during pregnancy or soon after childbirth than to die from the three leading obstetric causes of maternal death, according to The BMJ. Rebecca Lawn at Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues explained that most of these pregnancy-related homicides are linked to domestic/intimate partner violence and firearms.
Connecticut does not protect preborn children in the womb from abortion and does not classify the death of a preborn child in a violent attack as a homicide.
In the 2002 ruling of State v. Anonymous, the Connecticut Superior Court considered whether or not a preborn baby is a “human being” within the meaning of the penal code after the state applied for an arrest warrant of a person accused of the death of a preborn child whose mother had been shot.
According to attorney Christopher Reinhart, the judge in that case ruled, “Under Connecticut law, someone commits murder when he causes the death of another person. The statutes define a ‘person’ as a human being. ‘Human being’ is not defined and the court in this case ruled that the legislature did not intend that an unborn child be considered a ‘human being’ under the penal code.”
