Precursors

Big deal. Big news. Backstory before anyone else: PORT JERVIS — Maryann Venechanos laid out her fears about her husband last year, 14 months before police shot Peter T. Venechanos to death as he menaced them with a hand grenade outside Bon Secours Community Hospital.

In October 2006, she asked a Pike County Common Pleas Court judge to grant her a protection from abuse order, the Pennsylvania equivalent of an order of protection. She said that the abuser was her husband, Peter, a 65-year-old man with a long history of public service. He was a Vietnam veteran, she said, an 18-year New York City police officer who'd also worked for nine years as a Pike County correction officer. She told the judge that her husband had been taking medication for post-traumatic stress and is "always angry and enraged."