Just weeks ago, Crystal Salter was cuddling in bed with her two young daughters.

Salter was soaking up time with her girls. Until her boyfriend stormed in with a gun and shot her multiple times in the face and torso. He was found later in his car, having turned the gun on himself.

How can a child ever feel safe again having witnessed something so horrible?

“Can I see my mommy? I want to see my mommy. I want to go home,” her daughter Juliana has been asking her aunt Regina, who is taking care of her now that her mother has passed, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Salter, unfortunately, is not the only domestic-violence homicide victim Cook County has seen this year.

Chicago police recorded 57 domestic homicide victims in 2025 and 45 in 2024.

But there is a silver lining in the numbers: Domestic-violence homicides appear to be declining. CPD has recorded 21 domestic-homicide victims so far this year, down 52% from the same point in 2025.

We have spent two years sounding the alarm on this issue, and finally, something appears to be getting better. That’s worth recognizing and understanding, because the goal isn’t merely to criticize a broken system but to identify what actually saves lives.

More importantly, without keeping this mission squarely in focus, a year-over-year decline in domestic homicide is cold comfort to those still affected by the problem, including families like Salter’s, for whom the problem remains very real today.

To that end, it makes sense to consider what the histories of the remaining homicide cases tell us about the points where the system still fails to prevent lethal violence.

Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s office told us they are handling 13 intimate-partner homicides that were charged in Chicago in 2026 alone.

In all but two of those cases, the alleged perpetrator had a prior history of domestic violence involving either the homicide victim or another victim. That suggests these killings frequently did not emerge from nowhere. Meaning in most of the cases prosecutors are handling, there had been signs of violent behavior before someone was killed.

Amanda Pyron, president and CEO of The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, attributes the decline primarily to two things: Increased funding for services and Karina’s Law, which strengthened the process for removing firearms from people subject to orders of protection. Community-based services, she told us, can intervene before violence becomes lethal by helping survivors secure immediate housing, financial assistance, legal services, counseling and advocacy.

“It is clear that the investments in services made with ARPA funding from 2022 to 2025 and with City corporate funding in 2026, are beginning to yield dividends in survivor safety,” Pyron said.

There’s good reason not to declare the problem solved, however. Pyron said contacts to the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline continue to increase, with shelter among the leading needs. And only 18% of qualified applicants to The Network’s Survivor Fund received assistance, she said.

In other words, fewer people are dying even as demand for help remains high.

Still, something is clearly working, and the turnaround is particularly striking because domestic violence had been moving in the opposite direction from Chicago crime overall. Last fall, while homicides and fatal shootings citywide were falling sharply, domestic murders were up 30% and fatal shootings were up 53%.

That alarming divergence helped spur the City of Chicago-Cook County Violence Against Women Task Force, which launched last December to examine where government systems were failing victims and recommend ways to improve them. Its work, alongside the efforts of advocates and public officials, provides important context for the improvement we’re seeing now.

Twenty-one domestic-homicide victims is far less bad than the 43 Chicago recorded at this time in 2025, but it’s still too many.

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