A week ago Friday, John Peck shot his ex-girlfriend, Christen Naujoks, outside of her apartment in Wilmington, N.C. Then he hit the road. His dad told police that Peck intended to kill Naujoks's mother. Police in Ohio took Naujoks's parents into protective custody. Alerts sounded everywhere in-between.

A couple days later, a ranger at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (which straddles the North Carolina-Tennessee border) recognized Peck and confronted him. Peck got away, but moments later he ran a police roadblock, shot himself and drove off a cliff. He died either from the gunshot wound or from injuries sustained when he was ejected from his pickup.

A dramatic case, right? The stuff of tabloid TV--or at least a bad TV movie--but not a regular occurrence in a sleepy coastal resort town, right?

Not exactly. Naujoks is the second UNC-Wilmington student in two months to be murdered in this fashion. Jennifer Faulkner was raped and murdered on May 7. Her ex-boyfriend, Curtis Dixon, has been charged.

In fact, the news of Faulkner's murder prompted Naujoks's parents to call the Wilmington Star-News and ask them to look into the background of their daughter's ex-boyfriend. Both Dixon and Peck lied on their student applications, failing to disclose their criminal histories. In 2001, Peck pled guilty to one misdemeanor and two felony charges in connection with the sexual assault of an ex-girlfriend. After talking with Naujoks's mother and doing all the requisite research and double-checking, the newspaper published a story about Peck on May 30, five days before he killed Naujoks.

Naujoks and her family knew Peck was dangerous. Naujoks did everything she could to protect herself. She obtained a restraining order against Peck--one that he violated. She talked to the university police, who agreed to do whatever was possible to protect her while she was on campus. And Christen Naujoks didn't talk to the paper; her mother did. At first, it appeared that this noble effort to publicize the problem of domestic violence may have caused Peck to kill Christen Naujoks. But the police now say that it appears that Peck had been planning the murders of Naujoks, her mother and many other women since least mid-May, two weeks before the newspaper story appeared. Indeed, no one is certain that Peck read the story--though he must have learned about it when the university kicked him out after the story hit the newsstands.

A crusading family, a second student murder in as many months, a car chase through the mountains...there are all these compelling angles to the story, and yet Naujoks herself simply becomes yet another statistic: Every day approximately four women are murdered by boyfriends or husbands (or ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands). This story is still grabbing headlines here, but this sort of thing happens every single day. In any given year, approximately 1,400 women are killed as the result of domestic violence. These are the FBI's stats, not mine.

In Wilmington, people are asking what could have been done to prevent these deaths. Their senseless nature makes then seem eminently preventable. Maybe the newspaper shouldn't have run its story. Maybe the police should pay more attention to restraining orders. Maybe the university should screen all of its applicants for criminal records.

Maybe. But I don't think so. Even if all of those things happened, John Peck most likely would have killed Christen Naujoks. Because Peck's screwed-up brain was the cause of her death. And no matter what we do, there's very little that a society can do to defeat a single, deranged mind. In fact, the way our society is set up, we it's almost impossible to do much of anything about a deranged mind until it actually proves itself deranged. The U.S. Constitution is clear: Every citizen is innocent until proven guilty.

This is no comfort for the Naujoks family, or the Faulkner family, or the thousands of families each year that must deal with the many and varied evils of our society. The Constitution isn't designed for comfort. Indeed, one of the basic premises of the document is to provide rights for those without the power to demand rights. In this case, I'm talking about criminals. Specifically, I'm talking about people who perpetrate domestic violence.

Rather than railing at a judicial system that "fails" victims, it would be better to look within ourselves and decide what we can do to make the world better. We can cower in fear, or we can be like Christen Naujoks's mother, who called up a newspaper to help shine a light the very real terror of domestic violence. It is not ironic that her daughter died; it's just sad. Every death every day is sad. Some deaths are more tragic than others, I suppose, but in every case a life is snuffed out. And it's up to those of us who are still alive to try and live up to the promise of those who are no longer with us.

There are a lot of terrible, damaged people in the world. There's no way to get rid of them. We've just got to try to do the best we can to protect ourselves and those we love while still living our lives freely and fully. Sometimes we fail. Sometimes we don't even stand a chance of succeeding. But if we don't live our lives, then we admit defeat before the battle even begins.

Jon Worley is constantly astonished by the wretchedness and beauty of humanity.