A California mother was stabbed to death in front of her children by her ex-boyfriend, whom she had filed a restraining order against, police said.
Officers found 30-year-old Eleni Tavau unresponsive, but still alive, in her home on Sunday with multiple stabbing injuries, the Salinas Police Department said in a news release. Two of her children, both toddlers, were nearby at the time, police said.
Tavau was taken to the hospital in grave condition, where she died from her injuries.
Police arrested her ex-boyfriend and the father of her children, Rodrigo Bravo, 32, on suspicion of felony child endangerment, violation of probation and violation of a domestic violence restraining order. He turned himself in to authorities less than three hours after Tavau was stabbed, police said.
The Monterey District Attorney’s Office didn’t answer questions from HuffPost, but online court records showed that Bravo had entered a plea of not guilty.
Brian Johnson, a spokesperson for the Salinas Police Department, told local news outlet KSBW that Bravo stabbed Tavau in front of her children.
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“And he basically did it in front of them or in the area of the kids, so that’ll be one of the charges ― because the kids were present, [the] felony [would be] child endangerment,” Johnson said.
Tavau’s brother Alex Carr told KSBW that when he spoke to his sister hours before her death, she told him she was planning on leaving her boyfriend to move in with him in Reno, Nevada.
“She started telling me how he started getting abusive, verbally, mentally and then physical, and she made it seem like, just didn’t want anything to do with him,” Carr said.
On Facebook, Tavau’s father mourned his daughter in several posts honoring her legacy. He shared a screenshot of a post she made in December in which she said that she had had enough of Bravo after previously putting her goals aside to support him.
“I may now proceed with my goals❤️✌️,” she wrote at the time.
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
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