DALLAS (AP) – Six people were found shot to death in a suburban Dallas home on Monday after police said two brothers made a pact to kill four relatives and themselves.
The officers at Allen went to the house for a welfare check at around 1 am, after receiving a call from a friend of one of the brothers who feared he was suicidal, said the police sergeant. Jon Felty.
“It looks like the two brothers made a deal, they were going to commit suicide,” said Felty.
Felty said one of the two brothers wrote a long post on social media stating that he and his brother had a plan to kill family members and then themselves. He also wrote that all of his decisions were based on weighing pros and cons, including the decision to kill his family.
The police found the six family members killed in the house. Felty said that among the dead are the two brothers, a sister, his father and mother and a grandmother. Felty said the dead ranged between 19 and 70 years. He said the murders probably took place over the weekend.
Felty said he had not yet released the names of the victims. He said the deaths were being investigated as murder-suicide, but he still couldn’t say who shot whom.
The brother who wrote the post on social media says that he has cut himself more frequently recently and that lately his treatment for depression – which included counseling and medication – did not seem to help him as much as before, Felty said.
In the post, he also spent “a lot of time” writing about his disappointment at the way the television series “The Office” ended, Felty said. “He thought he should have ended up very differently and was upset …”
The brother who wrote the post on social media also said he thought it was too easy for his brother to obtain a firearm, Felty said.
A mass murder where two brothers are the perpetrators is rare, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University.
“In these situations, mass murder is usually a perpetrator,” he said.
The Associated Press / USA Today / Northeastern University mass murder database recorded 452 incidents of mass murder – the murder of four or more people – from 2006 to Sunday, he said. He said that almost half of them – 217 – were mass murders in which someone killed family members.
He said that of the 217 mass murders of families, 207 involved a single perpetrator.
The only other family mass murder recorded in the database that involved siblings was a murder in 2015 in Oklahoma. Two brothers – Robert and Michael Bever – were sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of the stabbing deaths of their parents and three brothers. At the time of the murders, Robert was 18 and Michael was 16.
Fox generally said in murders involving two perpetrators, “usually one is the leader and the other is the follower”.
“The leader feels good about the fact that someone sees him, looks at him and is willing to do what he says,” said Fox. “And then the follower usually delights in the fact that the most dominant person praises for his loyalty and strength. So it can be mutual – it can be a pact, but it is usually one person who sets the ground rules and the other person who agrees with them ”.
By Jamie Stengle