Five children found dead in Graham (WA)-area home

[PSPS]

Source: Seattle Times

By The News-Tribune

Pierce County Sheriff's deputies late this afternoon found five children, ages 7 to 16, dead in a Graham-area home, apparently the victims of homicidal violence.

Pierce County Sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said investigators believe the children may have been killed by their father who was discovered dead earlier Saturday afternoon at an unspecified address in King County. They believe the man, 35, took his own life.

Deputies were called to check on the welfare of the children in a home in the 20400 block of 135th Avenue Court East after officers found the father's body.

Troyer said four of the children were girls. One, the 7-year-old, was a boy, Troyer said.

Troyer said investigators are just beginning to unravel the crime, and information available now is very preliminary.

Read more: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008986370_websixdead04m.html

[Renew Deal]

1. The body count continues

What are we up to this weekend with mass murders? Like 20?

[Liberal_in_LA]

31. Last 2 or 3 weeks? 4 police in oakland, 3 in PA, 10 by Alabama shooter, 13 by NY shooter, 5 by WA da

Am I missing any?

[rrneck]

2. Sit down, strap in, and hang on.

There's more in the pipe I'm afraid. But I hate thinking that way.

[tomm2thumbs]

3. tragic - and so strange all of this happening now -

[CANDO]

13. Not strange at all. It's called people snapping under extreme economic pressure.

I predicted this awhile back to my wife.

[slackmaster]

38. Weird shit often happens in April

1st
-1933 - Nazi Germany began persecuting Jews with a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses.
-2001 - Same-sex marriage becomes legal in the Netherlands, which is the firstx country to allow it.
-2002 -The Netherlands legalizes euthanasia, becoming the first nation in the world to do so.
2nd
-1917 - President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy."
-2006 - 60 tornadoes break out in the US killing 29 people
3rd
-1974 - The Super Outbreak begins - 148 tornadoes - 13 states - 315 dead
-1996 - Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is arrested
-2004 - Surrounded by police, five suspects in Madrid railway bombings blew themselves up in a building outside the Spanish capital, also killing a special forces agent.
4th
-1841 - President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia one month after his inauguration, becoming the first U.S. president to die in office.
-1968 - Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated
-2008 - Raid on FLDS compound in Texas
5th
-1887 - British historian Lord Acton wrote in a letter, "All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
6th
-1830 - Mormon church founded
-1917 - US declares war on Germany
-1994 - The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed in a plane crash near Rwanda's capital which begins the Rwandan genocide.
7th
-1906 - Mt Vesuvius erupts and devastates Naples
-2001 - An unarmed black man wanted on 14 misdemeanor warrants was fatally shot by a white police officer in Cincinnati, sparking three days of riots.
8th
-1895 - The Supreme Court of the United States declares income tax to be unconstitutional
-1943 - President Roosevelt, in an attempt to check inflation, freezes wages & prices and prohibits workers from changing jobs
-1952 - President Harry S. Truman seized the steel industry to avert a nationwide strike.
9th
-1865 - Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the village of Appomattox Court House, Va.
10th
-1912 - Titanic Set Sail
-1963 - The nuclear-powered submarine USS Thresher and its crew of 129 was lost off Cape Cod, Mass.
-1996 - President Bill Clinton vetoed a bill that would have outlawed a technique that opponents call "partial-birth" abortion.
-2001 - The Netherlands legalized mercy killings and assisted suicide for patients with unbearable, terminal illness.
-2002 - Eight Israelis were killed by a suicide bomber aboard a bus in Haifa.
-2007 - A woman wearing an explosives vest strapped underneath her black robe blew herself up in the midst of 200 Iraqi police recruits in Muqdadiyah, killing 16.
11th
-1814 - Napoleon Bonaparte abdicated as emperor of France and was banished to the island of Elba.
-1986 - Miami FBI Shoot-out
-2006 - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had succeeded in enriching uranium on a small scale for the first time.
12th
-1861 - Civil War begins
-1934 - The US Auto-Lite Strike begins, culminating in a five-day melee between Ohio National Guard troops and 6,000 strikers and picketers.
-1945 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage
-1999 - U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright found President Bill Clinton in contempt of court for giving "intentionally false" testimony in a lawsuit filed by Paula Jones about his relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
-2001 - Cincinnati Mayor Charles Luken declared a state of emergency amid an outbreak of racial violence.
13th
-1873 - Colfax Massacre - 108+ killed in Louisiana in a fight between whites and blacks
-1945 - German troops kill over 1,000 prisoners in Gardelegen Germany
-1970 - Oxygen tank on Apollo 13 explodes
-1992 - Great Chicago Flood
14th
-1846 -The Donner Party of pioneers departs Springfield, Illinois, for California, on what will become a year-long journey of hardship, cannabilism, and survival.
-1865 - Lincoln shot
-1935 - Black Sunday - the worst storm of the Dust Bowl
-2002 - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to office two days after being ousted and arrested by his country's military
15th
-1865 - Lincoln dies
-1912 - Titanic sinks
-1986 - The United States launched an air raid against Libya in response to the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin on April 5
-1989 - Hillsborough disaster - 96 soccer fans die in a 'human crush'
16th
-1947 - Texas City Disaster - freighter explodes killing 581 people and destroying the port of Texas City
-1990 - Jack Kevorkian goes through with his first assisted suicide
-2007 - a student killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., before taking his own life in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history
17th
-1861 - The Virginia State Convention voted to secede from the Union
-1961 - About 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles launched an invasion at the Bay of Pigs on the southwestern coast of Cuba in a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.
18th
-1775 - Paul Revere Rides
-1906 - a major earthquake struck San Francisco and set off raging fires. More than 3,000 people died
-1983 - Suicide bomber destroys US Embassy in Beirut Lebanon killing 63
19th
-1775 - American Revolution begins
-1861 - Baltimore Riot - Pro-Secessionist marchers attacks US Army troops
-1933 - The United States went off the gold standard
-1943 - Warsaw Ghetto uprising
-1993 - Branch Davidian compound burns down
-1995 - Oklahoma City Bombing
-1997 - Flooding from the Red River forced more than 50,000 residents to abandon Grand Forks, N.D.
20th
-1889 - Hitler born
-1914 - Ludlow Massacre - 20 people (11 of them children) killed during an attack by the Colorado National Guard on striking miners
-1978 - Korean Air Flight 902 shot down by Soviets
-1999 - Columbine School Shooting
-2007 - Johnson Space Center Shooting & Hostage situation
21st
-1836 - Texans led by Sam Houston defeated the Mexicans at San Jacinto
-1898 - Spanish-American War begins
-1980 - Rosie Ruiz, the first woman to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon, was disqualified when officials discovered she had jumped into the race about a mile from the finish
-1989 - Tiananmen Square Protests
22nd
-1889 - Oklahoma Land Run
-1945 - Jasenovac Concentration Camp Revolt - 520 prisoners killed
-2000 - In a pre-dawn raid, armed immigration agents seized Elian Gonzalez from his relatives' home in Miami
23rd
-2003 - SARS outbreak forces Beijing schools to close for two weeks
24th
-1877 - Federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North's post-Civil War rule in the South
-1898 - Spain declared war on the United States
-1915 - Armenian Genocide begins
25th
-1792 - Highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier became the first person under French law to be executed by guillotine
-1898 - The United States declared war on Spain
-1945 - Delegates from some 50 countries met in San Francisco to organize the United Nations
-2007 - The Dow Jones industrial average topped 13,000 for the first time
26th
-1865 - John Wilkes Booth killed
-1933 - Gestapo is established
-1986 - Chernobyl Nuclear Accident
-1991 - 55 tornadoes break out in the central US killing 24
-2000 - Vermont Gov. Howard Dean signed the nation's first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions
-2002 - An expelled student went on a shooting rampage at a school in Erfurt, Germany, killing 13 teachers, two students and a police officer before taking his own life.
27th
-1805 - Marines attack Derna, Tripoli
-1861 - Lincoln suspends writ of habeas corpus allowing him to imprison 18,000 suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial
-1865 - The steamer Sultana exploded on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tenn., killing more than 1,400 Union prisoners of war
28th
-1789 - The crew of the British ship Bounty mutineed
-1967 - Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali refused to be inducted into the Army.
-1973 - The town of Antelope California ceases to exist as a train carrying 6000+ bombs and liquefied petroleum gas explodes reducing every building to the foundation
-1988 - The roof of an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 peeled back during a flight from Hilo to Honolulu, killing a flight attendant and injuring 61 people.
-2004 - The first photos of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal were shown on CBS
29th
-1945 - American soldiers liberated the Dachau concentration camp
-1945 - Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler married his longtime mistress Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker. The couple killed themselves the next day.
-1992 - Rodney King riots
30th
-1789 - Washington becomes first elected president of US
-1900 - Casey Jones died in a train wreck
-1945 - Hitler commits suicide
-2001 - Chandra Levy went missing

[On the Road]

45. It is True That April is the Cruelist Month

[EmilyAnne]

4. I know its all a part of the irrational thinking that goes into such a tragedy, but why the hell do

people need to take others with them?
Why not just commit suicide?

In the case of some angry spree killer, its the irrational belief that someone else should suffer along with them.

In this case, is it that the father actually believed that the children would be better off dead than living on after their father's suicide?
Or maybe revenge against their mother.

All of it is nuts. Just curious about the angle of the nuttiness, I guess.

[doctor jazz]

6. There are some folks who actually hope their children die before they themselves do

It's a horrible thing to contemplate but I can see the reasoning. One fellow on tv the other day with an autistic son wondered how the kid could ever survive (especially in whatever healthcare system exists right now) by himself. I can appreciate his feelings on the matter and can't imagine how people actually manage to deal with those kinds of situations. It's really awful.

[uppityperson]

10. I am sad when people do it backwards. Suicide is bad enough, but I'd rather have someone

kill themselves first, before killing others.

[jwirr]

11. As idiotic as it may sound he may have thought he was protecting

them from the terrible world that caused him to commit suicide.

[timtom]

32. That doesn't sound idiotic at all.

I was thinking yesterday of my mom and dad, who died in the early 90's, and how I was glad they were spared all this.

[jwirr]

35. That is what I was thinking. I am glad my mother is not here to see

this either - the last go-round of economic downturn she had a nervous breakdown. But my dad is another matter. He would be right here on DU fighting with us - I really miss his advice on these kinds of things.

[raccoon]

44. I know how you feel. I'm glad my parents didn't see the Katrina aftermath. nt

[pnwmom]

29. Some parents are so narcissistic that they cannot think of their children

except as extensions of themselves.Their children have no separate existence in their minds. If they believe they will be better off dead, then their children will be better off, too.

And, yes, revenge could certainly be a factor, too, in this type of killing.

[redqueen]

50. Very well said. (nt)

[Carni]

55. I think it's narcissism AND GUILT

God help us all...I hope this economy improves because this seems to go on and on.

I wish there was some way to make people realize that their self worth should not be tied to a dollar sign.

I am not a religious person but right about now I am saying a prayer :(

[Arugula Latte]

53. My theory: It's often a male-power-control thing

As in: If I can't have my kids, I'll show my wife a thing or two and SHE can't have them, either.

Yes, there are a few women spree killers, but the overwhelming majority are male, and I think male ego and attempts to display power play a big role in these things.

[Missy Vixen]

5. There are no words

Wonder what the reasons for this one will be...

[Mari333]

7. jesus this is like an epidemic

children and animals..people are abusing and killing them in droves or just going in and shooting people up..wtf is going on.

[RedCloud]

8. Hard times but no reason to kill anyone.

This is just another senseless tragedy and maybe why the bailout was given to the wrong people to make others more desperate so crazy they kill their own kids. Totally selfish and murderous act by their father.

[EmilyAnne]

9. I wonder if they really feel that there is no one to help them or if their pride won't allow them to

seek help.

I guess by the time this kind of thinking starts, where someone is planning to kill themselves and their children, its usually to far gone for getting some psychological help.
One of the traps of very acute depression is that people believe that their life is just so hopeless that there is no way on the world that it can improve.
That their life is so messed up that no one else in the entire world could understand, much less help.

Its so sad.

[bdamomma]

49. in the Depression did this kind of killing go on? mass murders.

[benEzra]

51. If it did, it probably wasn't talked about.

My grandmother (born 1915, IIRC) was very tight-lipped about negative things that pertained to the extended family. I think that silence may have been a generational thing.

[nickyt]

12. OMG...where is mama? No mention of her...too much, too much -

[atreides1]

46. From the story

"The night before, the father and his eldest daughter went in search of the wife, Angela Harrison. The daughter used a GPS feature in her mother's cell phone to find her with another man at a convenience store in Auburn, said Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the Pierce County Sheriff.

The woman told her husband she was not coming home, and was leaving him for the man with her at the store. The father and the daughter left, distraught, Troyer said. Sometime after the children went to sleep, he shot them each multiple times. Four died in their beds. The fifth was found in the mobile home's bathroom, surrounded by signs of violent struggle."

It seems the mother wanted out of a bad marriage.

[alarimer]

14. What a country we live in.

It's easier to get a gun than health insurance.

[AlphaCentauri]

15. this is becoming an epidemic n/t

[Djinn]

27. or the media reporting of it is anyway

the murder rate in the US has been pretty static for a long time. Mass media being such a huge part of our lives now, we just hear about it more often

[Supersedeas]

52. and they give us the superficial and the sensational--then back to commercials

[MasonJar]

16. People are distraught and guns are available everywhere.

[Pavulon]

17. I cant turn a corner with out guns, whores, and coke in my face!

everywhere! oh yeah, you have to look to find them things... How do people go through the day with out raping? A cock in hand is all that is needed? Oh yeah, reality.

[Missy Vixen]

19. Oh, we'd better not criticize your precious guns, huh?

Comparing a murder of an innocent child via firearm to a rape is nothing short of ridiculous.

It's fascinating to me that you (and all of your fellow gun nuts,) will not admit that despite the fact there are FORTY PEOPLE now dead that weren't a week ago, and multiple spree shootings in the US since last Sunday, there might be a problem. After all, their right to safety was sacrificed to make sure their murderers' Second Amendment rights remained intact. We all know what's more important, don't we? :sarcasm:

[Djinn]

28. and using the death of children to further

an anti-gun position is also pretty gross, people kill their kids in Australia too - they don't use guns but the kids are just as dead.

America's ridiculous murder rate goes far deeper than access to guns, but the real reasons for it might not be so easy.

[lanlady]

34. And gun makers want college students to buy weapons

and carry them on campus. Not as if the firearms industry takes advantage of situations like Va Tech to cash in on fear, right?

[Djinn]

43. did I say they didn't?

[Missy Vixen]

39. Oh, another strawman!

>people kill their kids in Australia too - they don't use guns but the kids are just as dead.

So, there were forty killed over the past week in Australia, with five dying yesterday?

Again, it's amusing to me that those who have a fetish for guns will grasp at any straw to get the rest of us to shut up, up to and including accusing us of "making political points with dead people," but you don't give a shit how many people die as the result of the use of your death toys.

[Djinn]

42. talking of strawmen

fetish for guns?

NEVER owned one, never wanted too (unless I move to the US permanantly in which case I'll reconsider because I'd be living in the place with the highest murder rate of any western nation as opposed to a nice little hick backwater of 5000 people)

getting you to shut up?

WHERE did I do that - and how could I from (currently) 10,000 miles away, when someone responds to your point how on EARTH is that getting you to shut up? Do you feel that way in real world conversations? Must be a quiet life you lead.

but you don't give a shit how many people die as the result of the use of your death toys.

That's a whole straw village right there - yeah I don't give a shit about people dying and want to preserve a "toy" I don't even fucking own - wonder why gun control advocates piss people off so much.

The US has a problem with murder that goes deeper than gun availability - you think looking into WHY that is isn't important?

:eyes:

[lanlady]

33. amen to that

I was thinking the same this morning--that the gun enthusiasts are going to be out in force, just as they always are after shooting sprees. Next up on the NRA's agenda: how these tragedies could be avoided if we allowed elementary school children to carry guns for self-defense.

[llmart]

41. You're post is idiotic.....

You are so stuck in your close-minded attitudes about guns that you can't open your mind enough to find some reasonable common ground.

[earcandle]

18. This apocalypse now has been designed to go off for some time now, I suspect this is fallout planned

by those nuts who are seeking to revive end of the world
mythology.
Like all the floods, the suicides, the children killing
parents,
parents killing children.

People and how they deal with stress is quite predictable,
when regulations
go out and survival issues are not addressed with respect. 
Those governors
who don't want a stimulus prolly got lots planned for their
poor population.
they really want to deploy blackwater et al and destroy this
country with
war and then reassemble under this new economy where we are
feudal slaves again.

Boy, do I hope I am wrong. 

[aquart]

21. Yes, dear. The elite are in complete control.

They knew exactly what would happen and did it on purpose. Because they're so much smarter and crueller than you or I. Yes, indeedy, a whole other species.

Is it so very important to you to believe that SOMEONE knows exactly what they're doing?

[earcandle]

37. Actuaries are paid to assess needs and to allocate resources in

communities so that budgets can manage disaster and maintain
the  health and well being of folks.

I would say there is a population of managers who have been
trained to 
prepare for disasters across the nation, especially at City
Halls.

Call these elites?  No, I call them program rats following the
orders of
nut cases who plan to wipe out the poor, beginning with
Katrina folks. 

I suspect these are the wealthy dems and repugs who think it
is their job
to make the tough decisions to let some people die so there
are enough resources
(oil, food, gov.funds) to go around.  I should quote my
Ecology text book here.
But my library is not in order since my last move from a 5
bedroom home to a 
1 bedroom apt.  

Do you have no concerns?  Have you no vision?  Unless you are
a troll, I can't imagine
anyone on DU that doesn't know how planning for services in
the community are supposed
to work when you care about your constituents.  We should not
be letting families and
individuals have to go criminal to survive.  This is the
criminalization of the poor.
Like the man who took his daughter into the store and pulled a
gun to get some money
to help her survive.  At least he didn't kill the shop owner. 
He was no criminal.
This is predictable behavior when safety nets go out, no
matter where you were raised
or how much education or family wealth you may have had.  When
confronted with the 
idea of homelessness, all of us consider suicide.  The thing
to avoid is to lose your
dignity and feel like you have to lick the ass of murderers
and criminals to survive.
That kind of goes against the grain of decent folks abandoned
by the workforce and the state.
 

[Fovea]

24. My main quibble

is with the word 'again'

Scratch any gilded age and find a substrate of serfs.

The elites worship at the altar of creative destruction.
And things were just too damn boring for real profit.
Particularly if your job involves weapons.

[krispos42]

20. This seems to becoming the signurature crime of the current depression

Kill your family, then off yourself.




I've said before that the school shooting had become a stain on our nation's collective mentality, adn that they would not stop by anything people do but would continue until the novelty faded and the idea became trite... something that would be difficult in our media-saturated world. It would probably take a generation or more to fade.

Well, now we have a new generational stain on our psyche... wiping out your whole family, including yourself. That guy in Boston tried it and came damn close to suceeding, it's happened a couple of times recently in California, and now here in Washington.

:-(

[Snazzy]

22. cult murder/suicides come to mind

Jonestown, Branch Dividians, whomever that cult was that thought the space ship meteor was coming. Saw the movie about Hitler's bunker recently (The Bunker?), similarities if it actually went down like that. A hard leap of warped to analyze. Killing your own before outside forces pop your psycho bubble and control. Authority launches it with the cults of course.

(Caveat, haven't read too much about this awful incident, just thinking about this kind of sociopath and all our national bloodshed in general).

[krispos42]

23. Heaven's Gate

Although this current crop of psycopaths seem to think they're sparing their families from a devestating life of homelessness and crime or whatever.



I wish they'd just ram into a bridge column at 85mph and let the survivors collect the insurance money.

[Snazzy]

26. yup

Your original post has me continuing some thinking from yesterday with the NY shooting rampage. In part, how the state, itself the authority figure in a way, can model violent behavior (murders used to go up--may still, dunno--when the state performed an execution). 8 years of the you're with us or against us mentality, wars, torture, might is right. Likewise in a respect, someone commits these heinous familial murder/suicides, and some other psycho grows an on-switch.

Hope it is not a trend. Seems like a trend.

[earcandle]

36. Why does MSNBC play criminal footage all weekend?

That is programming we can do without.

[Bushknew]

25. This phenomena is the consequence of our government spending more money to..

improve our military rather than to improve our society i.e. health care, education & jobs.

[Vinca]

30. It's useless to mention the glut of guns in our society.

Even DU erupts when someone suggests that every wingnut and his brother shouldn't own a weapon or that deer hunters don't require assault rifles. We'll just keep shooting each other. Everyday will bring new heartbreak. But as long as our precious second amendment is preserved to the max, that's all that matters.

[Arugula Latte]

56. Exactly. The gun nuts run the show, and the best you can do is hope you're not in the wrong place

at the wrong time.

These mass murder sprees will keep happening again and again and again because we as a society have decided that they are perfectly fine because ensuring that every nutcase has easy access to any weapon he pleases is far more important than the lives of innocents.

[Aristus]

40. Shit. That's just right down the road from me.

Poor kids...

[GoddessOfGuinness]

47. 2 adults and 5 kids living in 1 mobile home

The couple had been together since the mom was 13. If her husband was abusive, as the neighbors suggest, I wonder why she didn't take her kids with her.

And I wonder why, when the neighbors often heard the father screaming at his kids, nobody heard a gun go off at least 5 times. Are they a little too accustomed to hearing gunshots, or simply unwilling to get involved?

So sad...Those poor children...

[bdamomma]

48. people just seem to not respect life anymore.

and take even their children with them.

[carlyhippy]

54. W T F is the MATTER with PEOPLE?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?

Humans suck and they suck more as time goes along. Children are either being abducted and killed, or shot and killed by THEIR OWN PARENTS!!! I am so ashamed of our human race, I would think a parent would especially think of their children as precious beings, WHY would a person harm a child?! AARGGGHH! People need to learn how to act, good lord!