A day after a man killed his estranged wife and was found dead blocks away in the typically sleepy Portage Park neighborhood, blame was cast Wednesday on a Cook County judge who refused to hold the suspect in custody as he faced charges in an earlier attack on the same woman.Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza pushed Judge Thomas E. Nowinski to resign, noting that she wouldn’t “trust him with a traffic ticket at this point.” Advocates for domestic violence survivors, meanwhile, urged Chief Judge Timothy Evans to reassign Nowinski to prevent him from hearing similar domestic cases. Judge Thomas E. NowinskiCook County Democratic Party Nowinski rejected prosecutors’ petition to have Constantin Beldie held in jail after he was charged in October with choking and attempting to kidnap his wife, Lacramioara Beldie.Although the charges came after she filed a second protective order against her husband this year, Nowinski only placed Constantin Beldie on GPS monitoring with some other restrictions.On Tuesday afternoon — hours after Constantin Beldie, 57, pleaded not guilty to those pending charges — he fatally stabbed Lacramioara Beldie, 54, in the 5600 block of West Leland Avenue, according to Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. An off-duty detective who intervened and fired at Constantin Beldie suffered a graze wound to the leg.Constantin Beldie was later found dead in a car in the nearby 5700 block of West Giddings Street, authorities said. The medical examiner’s office hasn’t ruled on his cause of death.Mendoza and the victims’ advocates both highlighted another fateful decision Nowinski made on the bench earlier this year. After Nowinski denied a protective order against Crosetti Brand, a convicted felon with a history of domestic violence, Brand stabbed the woman who sought protection and killed her 11-year-old son, Jayden Perkins.“These victims would not have been victims had Judge Nowinski done his job,” Mendoza told the Sun-Times. “It should never be okay to have two people die on your watch within eight months of each other, or ever frankly.She added: “There has to be accountability. And it shouldn’t be until the next election cycle, it should be now.”“Judge Nowinski’s failure to protect the community has now resulted in two tragic, preventable murders,” said Amanda Pyron, president and CEO of The Network. “He has repeatedly shown he does not have the judgment necessary to keep survivors safe, and at a minimum he must be reassigned.Nowinski is a former Cook County prosecutor who rose the ranks to become a deputy supervisor in the litigation unit of the state’s attorney’s office, according to a biography on the Cook County Democratic Party’s website.He was hired in 2020 to serve as chief of staff to Iris Martinez, clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County. He later beat out attorney Carmen Migdalia Quinones in the June 2022 judicial primary and ran unopposed in the general election.His six-year term began in December 2022.As a candidate, he made a vow in blog post: “I know what it means to bring honor and dignity to the bench and pledge to do so if the people of Cook County choose me.”Mendoza said he hasn’t lived up to that promise. “Instead, he brought dishonor and tragedy,” she said.Nowinski couldn’t be reached. A spokesperson for Chief Judge Evans didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.Tuesday’s attack happened in the 5600 block of West Leland Avenue, a family-friendly residential area on the Northwest Side. An off-duty detective who witnessed the stabbing fired shots in the suspect’s direction and suffered a graze wound while trying to stop him.Beldie was previously charged in a separate attack against his wife on Oct. 9 — the same day he was served with an emergency order of protection she had sought, court records show.Prosecutors filed a petition that day to have him held in Cook County Jail pending trial, but it was denied by Nowinski. The judge instead released the suspect on GPS monitoring, ordered him to refrain from possessing weapons, and forbade him from visiting his wife’s home, work or school.According to her petition for the protective order, the second the woman had sought against her husband this year, she said he grabbed her as she was walking to the bus, tried to cover her mouth to stop her from screaming and attempted to knock her unconscious.“Someone heard me and began to call police,” she wrote in the petition. “He got in the car and drove off. As he was driving off he threatened me saying '[I’ll] do it, you don’t believe that I will do it’ as he was pointing a black object.”Beldie pleaded not guilty Monday to felony counts of aggravated domestic battery involving choking, aggravated battery, attempted kidnapping and unlawful restraint, court records show.“I can kill you now and put you in a bag and take you to the lake,” she recalled him saying, according to the petition. “I can get a gun and kill all of you and you don’t know. I don’t care if the police take me because you left me.”The physical and verbal abuse continued for eight hours, the woman wrote. When she finally escaped, he chased her but she was able to get away.She alleged that he had “been physically and emotionally” abusive throughout their long relationship and would send menacing messages. “You know how easy it is to kill someone?” she recalled him asking.“I took this as a threat from the [suspect] because my grandfather killed my grandmother and then killed himself,” she wrote.An emergency order of protection was granted the same day as her petition, which noted that she had filed a police report for domestic battery. Her husband apparently wasn’t charged.The emergency order was vacated March 25, when the woman and her husband agreed to a so-called no contact order. Among other things, the suspect agreed not to “harass, intimidate, physically abuse, stalk, or interfere with the personal liberty” of his wife.But when Beldie was ultimately charged in October, records indicated that he had never been the subject of a prior protective order. He was deemed “Medium-Low Risk” for committing future domestic violence, according to the records. A court document shows authorities had failed to flag a prior order of protection that was issued against a man who allegedly stabbed his wife to death this week while facing charges in another violent attack.Cook County court records Pyron, the advocate for abuse survivors, urged Cook County officials to “review procedures for domestic violence screening to ensure that judges have all the necessary information to accurately understand risk, including recent petitions for orders of protection.”“The failure to provide correct information in this case proved lethal.”