صراط عشق صراط عشق
Six people, including three children, were dead in rural Tennessee following an horrific murder suicide that unfolded on Thursday night.
Marion County Sheriff Bo Burnett described the scene as being “one of the worst I’ve been involved in all my career as a law enforcement officer.” The incident occurred in the tiny community of Sequatchie, around 30 miles west of Chattanooga, at around 8pm.
Law enforcement forces have confirmed that the suspect is Gary Barnett and that he is one of three adults found dead in the home.
Two of the victims have been named, one is Regina Barnett, the suspect’s wife, and her daughter, Britney Perez. In May, Regina had taken out a restraining order against her husband.
Perez was visiting the home at the time of the murders.
Police say that the perpetrator set fire to the home after shooting some family members, two of the victims died of smoke inhalation
Police say that the perpetrator set fire to the home after shooting some family members, two of the victims died of smoke inhalation
A neighbor, Sylvia Cooper, told WTVC that she heard glass smash and then around five gunshots.
Shortly afterwards, flames could be seen coming from the home. Fire teams from multiple communities were called to the scene to put out the fire.
At least two people died due to smoke inhalation. There was one survivor, an adult, who was rushed to a local hospital with several gunshot wounds. The deceased people include the children’s mother and grandmother.
Family mass killings have become a disturbingly common tragedy across the U.S. They’ve happened nearly every 3.5 weeks for the last two decades on average. In 2022 there were 17 of them, according to a database, compiled by multiple media organizations.
Ten were murder-suicides, and 14 were shootings. The database defines a mass killing as four or more people slain, not including the assailant.
Sequatchie, Tennessee, is one of more than 30 communities sent reeling by a family mass killing in the last two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty and spares no race or class.
A family mass killing — where four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator — happened each of the last two years in places as large as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona.
Motives can remain speculative in family killings in which assailants take their own lives, but police often cite financial or relationship issues as the causes.
Family mass killings immediately capture the attention of people in a community, but rarely garner the level of national attention received by mass killings at schools, places of worship or restaurants, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied
familicides and mass killings for decades.
Fox, who helped compile and maintains the database for the AP and USA Today, said that’s because it doesn’t carry the same kind of fear with the public. He noted police often issue messages saying there is no danger to the public shortly after the killings are discovered.
Family mass killings are in fact the most common type of mass killing, making up about 45% of the 415 mass shootings since 2006, according to the database. They happen twice as frequently as mass shootings in which members of the public are killed.
Most, but not all, involve handguns, only about a third involve households with a previous occurrence of domestic violence and most of the assailants have no violent history or criminal past, Fox said.
Father Admits to Fatally Shooting Three Sons
On Friday, prosecutors said an Ohio man accused of fatally shooting his three young sons admitted to planning the killings and lined them up before executing them with a rifle.
Chad Doerman, 32, who is also accused of wounding the boys’ mother at the family’s home, has been charged with aggravated murder, authorities said.
Clermont County’s chief prosecutor of Municipal Court, David Gast, said during Doerman’s arraignment Friday that one of the boys tried to flee into a nearby field but Doerman “hunted” his son down and brought him back to their home before killing him.
Gast called the killings the worst crime he’d ever seen.
Deputies responded to the home in Monroe Township shortly before 4:30 p.m. Thursday after receiving a pair of 911 calls, one apparently from the mother who was screaming that “her babies had been shot” and another from a passing motorist who said a girl was running down the street saying her father was killing people, a news release from the Clermont County Sheriff’s Office said.
The deputies found three boys, ages 3, 4 and 7, outside the home with gunshot wounds and tried to save their lives, but the children died at the scene.
The sheriff’s office said the 34-year-old mother, who was not identified, was outside the home and had suffered a gunshot to the hand while trying to shield her sons from their father. She was transported to a hospital with injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening.
Doerman was found sitting on a stoop at the home and was taken into custody without incident. He was arraigned on three counts of aggravated murder Friday.
Officials have not released a motive behind the shootings.
