Mother of 6 tried to protect herself. What police did before her husband killed her

Kristin Florio-Gile took step, after step, after step to protect herself and her six children from her husband.

At least three key steps, documented in police and court records. There could have been more.

Her family says the system failed her when she desperately needed it.

Three weeks before her estranged husband, Randy “Rocky” Gile, ran her off the road and shot and killed her on Oct. 6 — as he had repeatedly threatened to do — the 33-year-old Wichita woman had fled with her six children and summoned police after he allegedly pointed a gun at her.

Wichita police arrested the 33-year-old man and booked him into jail for felony aggravated assault after he threatened her on Sept. 15, according to a timeline The Eagle obtained from the Wichita Police Department. Police also seized three guns and ammunition, met with a prosecutor and interviewed her and one of her children. He bonded out of jail within a day.

In early October, police had an order to arrest him again — if they could find him. He possibly could have been put back in jail after Oct. 1 for violating a protective order she had obtained.

But he stayed free long enough to kill her and himself and rob her six children, ages 3 to 12, of their mother.

Her steps to protect herself and her three girls and three boys began two years ago: She filed for a protective order. In her own handwriting in a court document, she explained why she needed protection from him: “Threatens my life, pulled a gun on me … Threatens to hurt me.”

Her second step came last month when she drove her children away from their south Wichita home and told police that he pointed a gun at her.

Then, two days after she summoned police, she obtained a new protective order — which he allegedly violated — to keep him away.

After years of suffering violent abuse and control, “She was finally going through with it,” said a close friend, Jenny Foraker.

Florio-Gile and Gile had been married almost 13 years.

She’d had enough.

At 6:44 a.m. Oct. 3, she wrote on her Facebook page, “Every story has an ending. But in life, every end has a new beginning!!”

Her optimism and effort didn’t stop him.

On the evening of Oct. 6, a Saturday, on a rolling rural stretch of road on the northeast side of Derby, he tracked her down after she had gone to retrieve bunk beds and clothes from their home. She and her children had moved out and were staying with her parents.

She thought he was in jail, according to her family.

The Police Department said that in a detective’s “last communication” with her, she was told that a warrant would be issued for her husband, and that he would be arrested once he was located.

That evening, he used a rental car — that she wouldn’t have recognized — to force her SUV into a spin and up against a barbed wire fence on 63rd Street about a mile east of Rock Road. He had chased her for a few miles, east from K-15.

Before he killed himself at that spot, he fatally shot her. Her father was injured trying to protect his daughter.

A mother’s efforts

Her more recent contact with the system began around Sept. 15, when he pointed a gun at her and threatened to kill her, police say. According to a police report, he was drinking alcohol. Police arrested him within hours of the threat. Within a day, he posted a $25,000 bond and was released from jail.

According to a timeline police provided to The Eagle, officers seized evidence including guns and ammunition, and a detective interviewed her twice and a child once as part of the investigation.

On Oct. 1, police found out that Rocky Gile had allegedly violated a protective order against him, and the next day, police got prosecutors to move up a meeting on whether to file charges. The meeting on the assault case had originally been set for Nov. 6 — eight weeks after the alleged crime.

The new appointment for considering charges was set for Oct. 10 — four days after he killed her.

Even if prosecutors would have charged him, he wouldn’t have had to go back to jail because he had already posted bond, District Attorney Marc Bennett says.

Still, Bennett said, it’s possible that if prosecutors could have proven the protective order violation, they could have tried to revoke Gile’s bond. It would have sent him back to jail with a new bond he would have to post.

Even though police had an order to re-arrest him after the alleged violation, they couldn’t locate him until they were both dead.

‘That’s my mom’

Friends at her rosary on Wednesday said she was down-to-earth. She sometimes snorted when she laughed.

She was the kind of person who would come over and spend hours comforting an ill friend.

Enlarged pictures of her — beaming or posed with her children in front of a Christmas tree — had been carefully placed around the closed casket.

Before the service began, one of her young sons pointed out the photos of his mother.

The boy kept announcing, where everyone could hear and without a note of sadness, “That’s my mom!”

In row after row, people stared ahead.

Some wept.

Meth suspected

Rocky Gile’s older sister, Sherranda Gile, said Friday that she noticed her brother becoming short-tempered and violent about a year ago.

She suspected he was using methamphetamine. Sherranda Gile said she had struggled with methamphetamine for years but has been “clean for a year now.”

Her brother also “drank all the time, but you could never tell he was drunk,” she said. “He was one of those functional drinkers.”

She thinks her brother’s substance abuse led to the murder/suicide.

A detective told her parents that investigators found meth in his truck after the shooting, Sherranda Gile said.

“I believed he loved her (his wife)” and their children.

“She (Kristin Florio-Gile) was a very beautiful woman ... and that was his biggest fear, is that she was going to leave him. He said he couldn’t live without her,” Sherranda Gile said.

“The Rocky that was not doing drugs was a loving person,” his sister said.

She remembers his wife saying that she wanted “the old Rocky back.”

Troubled marriage

One of Florio-Gile’s close relatives told The Eagle that the system failed her, but the family wasn’t ready this past week to speak about why they felt the system let her down. They were busy preparing for her funeral and too angry about what happened to talk.

Florio-Gile’s almost-13-year marriage with her husband had been strained for years, according to court records.

A little over two years ago, when she filed for a protective order, she wrote in her petition against him that besides threatening her life with a gun, he “Has to be in control of everything. Not allowed a job, not allowed to go anywhere, have surveillance cameras up around our property. … I ended up being thrown down to the ground and he got on top of me and had his hands over my mouth.”

Foraker, her friend, said she urged her to disable the surveillance cameras. “I told her, ‘Kristin, take a baseball bat and get rid of them.’ But she couldn’t.”

About a month after she filed for the protective order that year, Rocky Gile filed for divorce.

His lawyer put in the divorce petition that he “has performed every duty required of him as husband” and that she “has failed to perform .. material marital duties and obligations.” Rocky Gile asked for, among other things, custody of the children and child support.

He filed an affidavit saying he had a full-time job as a truck driver, that she was a stay-at-home parent and that he was “forced out of the residence without the children by a PFA (protection from abuse).”

He listed monthly income of $4,116 and expenses exceeding his income.

About two months after she filed for the protective order, she agreed to dismiss her case.

By early 2017, his divorce case was dismissed.

Then came the assault last month, and she called police to her home, on a cul-de-sac near 53rd South and Hydraulic.

Florio-Gile drove her children to a store on Broadway to remove them from immediate danger.

Her cousin, Holly Jerome, says she isn’t surprised that Florio-Gile took her children away from her threatening husband that night.

“She was saying she could deal with the abuse on her, (but that) she would not be able to deal with the abuse toward her children,” Jerome said.

Police timeline

The Wichita Police Department provided this timeline:

Sept. 15: At about 11:30 p.m., officers responded to a call about an aggravated assault in the 5300 block of South Victoria Court, where the couple had lived for about five years. Later that night, police arrested him.

Sept. 16: Police took evidence including guns and ammunition. A police report listed three guns — a .22 caliber rifle, 12 gauge shotgun and 9mm handgun.

Sept. 17: The Police Department assigned a detective to the case; the detective received an initial appointment to present the case to the District Attorney’s Office on Sept. 19.

Also on Sept. 17, Rocky Gile was released from the Sedgwick County Jail on a $25,000 bond.

That is a typical bond amount for an aggravated assault case, District Attorney Marc Bennett said Thursday.

Sept. 19: The detective presented the case, and the District Attorney’s Office asked for additional investigation before deciding on possible charges. At that point, the DA’s Office set Nov. 6 as the new date for considering charges.

“Charging appointments are set by the DAs office,” the Police Department said in its timeline.

Bennett, the district attorney, said: “We set dates based on the information provided by the detective. If he needed an earlier date, that would have been made available.”

An important point, Bennett said, is that even if charges had been filed, it wouldn’t have led to Gile being re-arrested because he had already posted bond. However, that might have changed later when the detective received a report that Gile violated a protective order filed by his wife.

Also on Sept. 19, the detective interviewed Kristin Florio-Gile — identified by police as the victim in the aggravated assault case — and a child who was a witness.

Sept. 20: The detective interviewed Florio-Gile again.

Oct. 1: The detective “had contact with the victim,” police say in the timeline.

Oct. 1 also was the day when a protective-order violation was reported to the detective, police spokesman Officer Paul Cruz said Thursday.

Oct. 2: Because of the violation, police asked to move up the meeting with prosecutors to Oct. 10 — four days after the fatal shooting. The DA’s Office granted the request.

An order for Gile’s arrest went to all officers, Cruz said. But police “did not have any leads” on where he was, Cruz said.

If prosecutors can prove that a person has violated a protective order, Bennett said, they have two options: 1. File a misdemeanor charge that would bring a new warrant. 2. Seek to revoke the previous bond, which would result in the person going back to jail and facing a new bond.

Oct. 6: Rocky Gile shoots his wife and himself.

This story was originally published October 14, 2018 at 8:00 AM.