An abusive past shrouded in secrecy

She was sitting in a car in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Her estranged husband, Curtis Bernard Harris, was meeting her.

"Tami," she told her supervisor, Tamara Cerven, "if you don't hear from me, you need to find me."

For Cerven, who said she had witnessed her friend's attempts to keep Harris' anger in check for years, this marked a new low.

"That's when I really began to get scared," Cerven said.

Cerven had been documenting Harris' outbursts. She had urged her friend to get a restraining order.

Thomas-Harris told her: "A piece of paper doesn't stop the bullets."

Cerven's worst fears for her friend came to pass late last week. Thomas-Harris never made it to work Thursday, apparently taken by her husband. The body of the 37-year-old mother of two was found at a Whittier motel on Saturday morning with a single gunshot to the head. Harris was nearby, dead by his own hand.

The killings took place two weeks after Harris had been allowed to walk out of a Pomona courthouse after pleading no contest to two felonies and agreeing to serve 16 months in state prison.

He was due to be sentenced Jan. 24. The plea deal was agreed to by a prosecutor and judge even though a Los Angeles County Probation Department report said he was "unsuitable for release."

The charges marked one of the few times Thomas-Harris turned to authorities for help in what friends and family say had been a long and tumultuous relationship.

She often downplayed their problems, laughing off the October incident even after confiding to Cerven later that Harris had had a gun with him.

This week, her father, James Thomas, said he had no idea of the extent of his daughter's troubles. He said much of what he knows now he has learned from authorities and news accounts since her killing.

In many ways, experts say she was like thousands of other women who have been the victims of domestic violence, trying on their own to manage their abuser's anger.

"Domestic violence feeds on silence, and that shroud of secrecy allows abusers to commit crimes for many years and get away with it," said Amanda Turek, the community outreach manager at the YWCA San Gabriel Valley, which runs a shelter and domestic violence hotline.