By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
I have a temporary protective order in my past. No gun. No violence. No credible threat of any kind. My ex, Christina Avgerinos, couldn’t produce evidence because there wasn’t any — including the firearm she alleged I owned, which I have never possessed. The order was granted anyway, ex parte, on a sworn statement alone. It cost me years with my son. It cost me standing in a court system that treated the order as presumptive evidence of danger rather than what it was: a tactical filing in a custody dispute. Years later, and still, nothing has happened to her.
I am telling you this not because my case is the story. I am telling you because it is the context for a story that keeps killing people — and because the two failures are not separate. They are the same failure, compounding.
Three Cases. Three Deaths. One Answer.
On the morning of May 3, 2026, a Baltimore County attorney named Robert MacMeekin drove his daughter to a courthouse to obtain a temporary protective order against her husband, Mark Thomas Ryan. Ryan had beaten her the night before and told her he was going to retrieve a gun from his safe. She fled with the children to her parents’ home. The TPO was granted. By early afternoon, Ryan had driven to the MacMeekin residence, confronted Robert on the patio, and shot him dead while his daughter and wife watched.
The protective order had been in effect for approximately four hours.
This was not the first time Maryland watched a piece of paper fail to stop a bullet.
In July 2025, Sharity Cristwell was shot and killed in her Bladensburg apartment by her boyfriend Harry Lindsey — while Lindsey was wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor. A domestic violence lethality assessment had been completed after his arrest for assaulting and choking her. The case was formally classified as high danger. He was released to home detention anyway. She did not survive to attend the next court date.
In October 2023, Washington County Circuit Court Judge Andrew Wilkinson was shot in his driveway hours after granting sole custody of a divorcing father’s four children to their mother based on a documented history of domestic violence. Pedro Argote had been the subject of a domestic violence petition two years earlier — a petition that was dismissed at the petitioner’s request. Deputies had responded to the residence twice. None of it produced a hold. Argote drove to the judge’s home that evening and killed him.
Three cases. A personal injury attorney. A 29-year-old woman. A sitting circuit court judge. The system correctly identified danger in every one of them. Its most forceful available response was paper.
What the System Is Built to Do
Temporary protective orders exist because the alternative — requiring full evidentiary hearings before any protection is granted — would leave genuine victims unprotected during the most dangerous window of a domestic violence situation. The ex parte standard, the low evidentiary bar, the speed of issuance: these are features, not bugs. They are designed for cases like Ryan’s, like Argote’s, like Lindsey’s.
The problem is not the design of the TPO. The problem is that a TPO is the ceiling of the civil protective order system’s response capacity. The court’s first actions: It identifies. It documents. It notifies. It does not detain. It does not disarm. It does not place a body between the threat and the threatened.
When the threat is a man who has already demonstrated a willingness to commit violence, announced his intentions, and has access to a firearm, a TPO is a legal instrument handed to a person who has already decided the law does not apply to him.
MacMeekin’s family deserved more than that. So did Cristwell’s. So did Wilkinson’s.
How the False Accusation Problem Makes It Worse
Here is what almost no one covering these cases will say directly: the protective order system’s inability to respond more forcefully to genuine threats is partly a consequence of how thoroughly it has been weaponized against people who pose no threat at all.
I know this from my own court record. I know it from over five years of covering family court accountability. And I know it from the basic math of a system that processes an enormous volume of TPO petitions in contested custody and divorce cases — many of which involve genuine danger, and many of which do not.
When a judge reviews hundreds of TPO petitions annually, when the standard is a sworn statement and a signature, and when there is no meaningful enforcement mechanism for false or exaggerated filings, the system loses its ability to triage. Ryan and a father falsely accused by a vindictive ex in a custody dispute receive the same procedural response: paper.
That is not an argument for making it harder for genuine victims to obtain protection. It is an argument for building accountability into the filing side of the system — perjury enforcement in family court proceedings, evidentiary review at the final protective order stage that actually examines the basis of the original filing, and judicial tracking of petitions that are vacated, not extended, or later found to be unsupported.
None of that exists in Maryland in any systematic form. It creates a fear of fighting the TPO, knowing that justice is not possible.
The result is a system that is simultaneously too weak to stop a man who beats his wife on Friday and kills her father on Saturday, and too credulous to filter out a fabricated gun allegation that costs a father years with his child.
These are not opposite problems. A system flooded with false signals loses the capacity to respond to real ones. The children who needed the system to stop Shamar Elkins — the Shreveport father who killed eight of his own children in April 2026 after his wife announced she wanted a divorce — needed a system that had not been dulled by volume, ambiguity, and unaccountable filings, like the one from Christina Avgerinos.
They needed a system that could tell the difference.
What This Costs Children
The standard framing of this issue places domestic violence victims and falsely accused parents in opposition — as if strengthening one necessarily weakens the other. That framing serves the people who benefit from the current dysfunction. It does not serve children.
A child whose parent is killed in a domestic violence homicide has lost a parent. A child whose safe parent is separated from them by a false accusation has also lost a parent. The system has failed both of them. The mechanism is different. The cost to the child is not.
What both children needed was a system capable of an accurate, enforceable, proportionate response. What both children got was paper — either paper that failed to stop a violent person, or paper that falsely labeled a safe one as dangerous.
Maryland’s family court system does not track TPO grant rates by county. It does not track perjury referrals from family court proceedings. It does not track outcomes for children in cases where temporary orders were later vacated. It does not measure the gap between the threat level documented at the time of a filing and the outcome at the final hearing. And most often, it denies any petition for perjury filed by the falsely accused parent.
It cannot reform what it refuses to measure or blocks from happening.
That data void is not an oversight. It is a choice — one that protects the system from the accountability that documented patterns would demand. Judges face no metrics. Filers face no consequences. Children bear costs that nobody is counting.
Three dead in Maryland in three years because paper doesn’t stop bullets.
An unknowable number of children separated from safe parents because paper doesn’t require proof.
Same system. Same failure. Same children paying for it.
Sources: Baltimore Sun, reporting on the arrest of Mark Thomas Ryan in the killing of Robert MacMeekin, May 4, 2026; WJLA/7News, reporting on the arrest and conviction of Harry Lindsey in the killing of Sharity Cristwell, July 2025 and April 2026; NBC Washington, NBC News, and AP, reporting on the killing of Washington County Circuit Court Judge Andrew Wilkinson by Pedro Argote, October 2023; AP and CNN, reporting on the killing of eight children by Shamar Elkins in Shreveport, Louisiana, April 19, 2026.
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