Ise, meanwhile, was staying at the apartment. During those last few weeks, Palazzo says, her daughter often had a friend sleep over out of fear for her safety. On the morning of March 12, she called her mother and told her Marrapese had come around to the building the night before. According to the attorney general’ s office, Marrapese knocked on her windows and when she didn’ t answer, confronted one of the neighbors to ask if she was dating anyone. Palazzo encouraged her daughter to call the police.
“ He was there the night before, banging on her windows, telling her he was going to kill her,” she says.
On the morning of March 13, police found Ise dead in her apartment. Cuts and bruises covered her face, and several of her teeth were dislocated. There were marks around her neck, and a medical examiner determined she’ d been strangled to death. Palazzo learned during the trial that Marrapese had used medical forceps to crush her daughter’ s face. Defensive wounds on her hands indicated she had tried, futilely, to protect her body from the attack.
“ I was living in an apartment in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. And my son called me screaming,‘ He did it. He did it,’” Palazzo recalls.
Ise’ s murder garnered headlines for its brutality, and for its connection to another notorious criminal— Marrapese’ s father, longtime Rhode Island mobster Frank“ Bobo” Marrapese. But she was far from the only woman killed in Rhode Island that year. According to data gathered by the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Ise was one of four people killed in a domestic violence homicide in the state in 2019. Between 2016 and 2020, a report by the organization shows that twenty-six people were killed in domestic violence homicides in Rhode Island, a majority of them women killed by a current or former romantic partner or bystanders to an incident of intimate partner violence. The remaining cases involved family members, roommates and a male victim killed by his wife. More than half of the perpetrators had previously been subject to a restraining order or had domestic violence charges filed against them in court.
Between 2021 and 2023, preliminary data shows another twenty-two people were killed in domestic violence homicides in Rhode Island. Recent cases include victims like Danielle Arruda, the thirty-nineyear-old pregnant mother who was shot, alongside her two children, by her husband in their West Greenwich home in a murder-suicide last year. They include Liam Dempsey, the four-year-old shot and killed by his father in a 2024 murder-suicide in Warwick. They include Leila Duarte Da Luz, the pregnant thirty-fouryear-old whose body was found in Carbuncle Pond in Coventry after her ex-boyfriend and a friend murdered her in 2022. And they include those murdered in last December’ s mass shooting in Pawtucket, when an ex-spouse opened fire during their son’ s high school hockey game, killing their ex-wife, older son and former father-in-law and injuring two others before committing suicide.
“ On average, between four and seven Rhode Islanders lose their life every year to domestic violence, and in a majority of these cases, a firearm was used,” says Lucy Rios, executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
According to research cited by the RICADV, advances in domestic violence-related laws and the expansion of victim services in the 1980s and’ 90s led to an initial decrease in domestic violence homicides before
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