Marva Grayson was doused with gasoline and set on fire in her car while her 10-year-old son watched.

The 34-year-old Richland County woman died a month later of severe burns. Her husband, Dean Grayson, later pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Marva Grayson was among at least 30 women killed last year in South Carolina by their husbands or boyfriends, the state attorney general’s office said.

The domestic violence victims were honored in a ceremony Wednesday morning at the State House. The annual “Silent Witness Commemoration Day” is sponsored by the attorney general’s office and coincides with the start of national Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

South Carolina ranks first in the rate of women killed by men, the nonprofit Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said last week in releasing its study of 2001 FBI statistics.

As S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster read a list of the slain women’s names during Wednesday’s ceremony, relatives, friends and victim advocates carried life-size silhouettes representing the women across the south steps of the State House.

A bell chimed every nine seconds during the procession. A woman is beaten every nine seconds in the United States, McMaster said, citing FBI statistics.

“This is a tragic situation, not only for our families, but for our state,” McMaster said. “We not only lose the victim of these crimes, but in ways, we lose the children who grow up in a situation where this domestic violence is taking place.

“It is a cycle that must be broken,” he said.

Guest speaker Vicki Bourus, director of the Columbia-based South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, called for the creation of a fatality review team to examine every domestic violence homicide in the state.

She also said judges’ attitudes toward batterers must change.

“We still see a tendency to minimize the lethality of this crime,” she said.

Of the 30 defendants or suspects in last year’s cases, nine were convicted and received punishments ranging from a five-year suspended sentence for involuntary manslaughter to life in prison without parole for murder, the attorney general’s office said.

Trials are pending in 12 cases; nine other suspects committed suicide, records show.

Last year, fifteen of the state’s 46 counties had at least one domestic violence homicide, the attorney general’s office said. Aiken and Spartanburg led the state with four homicides each, followed by Berkeley, Greenville and Richland counties with three each.

During Wednesday’s ceremony, state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, said domestic violence is a “community problem” requiring “community solutions.”

“That means each of us doing whatever it is in our power to change — whether that might be not tolerating the jokes about domestic violence, whether that might be a recognition that it is indeed your business,” she said.

Reach Brundrett at (803) 771-8484 or rbrundrett@thestate.com.