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Homicide Victim Known For Work Helping Abused Women In Wichita

Tex Texin
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flickr Creative Commons

Wichita Police have identified the woman found dead in her home Tuesday morning as 42-year-old Perla Rodriguez. She was known for her work in helping abused women in the community.

Police determined Rodriguez died of blunt-force trauma. WPD spokesman Officer Charley Davidson says her boyfriend has been arrested and taken into custody for first-degree murder.

“Investigators are still going to be working on the case until it’s complete and presented to the DA’s office for official charging, but this is the update we have at this point," Davidson said during a press briefing Wednesday.

Rodriguez was the outreach director for the Wichita Area Sexual Assault Center. The organization said in a statement on its Facebook page that it is “saddened by the loss of our coworker and friend.”

The Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, of which WASAC was a member organization, said in its own statement that "This feels like a death in the family."

"At KCSDV, we work with domestic violence every day, yet this comes as a shock to us too. We say this with great sadness: We know that domestic violence can happen to anyone. No one is immune – not even our own victim advocates."

This is the 27th homicide in Wichita this year.

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Follow Nadya Faulx on Twitter @NadyaFaulx.

To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

Nadya Faulx is KMUW's Digital News Editor and Reporter, which means she splits her time between working on-air and working online, managing news on KMUW.org, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. She joined KMUW in 2015 after working for a newspaper in western North Dakota. Before that she was a diversity intern at NPR in Washington, D.C.