Six people were found shot to death in a suburban Dallas home after police said two brothers made a plan to kill four family members and themselves.
DALLAS – Six people were found shot to death in a suburban Dallas home early Monday after police said two brothers made a pact to kill four family members and themselves.
Officers in Allen went to the home for a wellness check around 1 a.m. after receiving a call from a friend of one of the brothers who feared he would kill himself, police Sgt. Jon Felty.
“It seems that the two brothers had reached an agreement, they were going to commit suicide completely,” said Felty.
Felty said that one of the two brothers wrote an extensive post on social media in which he said that he and his brother had a plan to kill their relatives and then themselves. He also wrote that all his decisions were based on weighing the pros and cons, including the decision to kill his family.
Police found all six of the family members dead in the house. Felty said that among the dead were two brothers, a sister, their father, their mother and a grandmother. Felty said the dead were between 19 and 70 years old. He said the killings likely occurred over the weekend.
Felty said the names of the victims had not yet been released. He said the deaths were being investigated as a murder-suicide, but could not yet say who shot whom.
The brother who wrote the social media post says that he has been cutting more often recently and that lately his treatment for depression, which included counseling and medication, didn’t seem to help him as much as it used to. Felty said.
At the post, he also spent “a lot of time” writing about his disappointment with how the television series “The Office” ended, Felty said. “He thought it should have ended very differently and he was upset …”
The brother who wrote the social media post also said he thought it was too easy for his brother to obtain a firearm, Felty said.
A mass murder in which two brothers are the perpetrators is rare, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University.
“In these situations, the mass killing is usually a single perpetrator,” he said.
The Associated Press / USA Today / Northeastern University mass murder database has recorded 452 mass murder incidents, the murder of four or more people, from 2006 through Sunday, he said. He said nearly half of them, 217, were mass murders in which someone killed members of his family.
He said that of the 217 mass murders of families, 207 involved a single perpetrator.
The only other mass murder in the family recorded in the database that involved siblings was a 2015 murder in Oklahoma. Two brothers, Robert and Michael Bever, were sentenced to life imprisonment after being sentenced to the stabbing of their parents and three brothers. At the time of the murders, Robert was 18 and Michael 16.
Fox said that, in general, in murders involving two perpetrators, “generally one is the leader and the other the follower.”
“The leader feels good about the fact that someone sees them, admires them, and is willing to do what they are told,” Fox said. “And then the follower usually takes delight in the fact that the most dominant person does so. praise for their loyalty and strength. So it may be mutual, it may be a pact, but generally it is one person who sets the ground rules and the other person agrees with them. “