Murder-suicides are devastating families across the US this holiday season, and experts warn the problem is getting worse
- At least a half dozen suspected murder-suicides — or familicides — occurred in the US in December.
- Perpetrators are typically middle-aged men; precipitating events are often separations or divorces.
From Hawaii to New York, Arizona to Massachusetts, some involving children, others involving spouses or intimate partners, news of suspected murder-suicides gripped Americans throughout December.
This holiday season, at least a half dozen such incidents have shocked and devastated communities across the country. Though murder-suicides are rare, the recent spate has prompted authorities and local officials to warn of a domestic violence crisis and plead for victims to seek help.In New York, a police sergeant was believed to have fatally shot his wife and two young sons before turning his gun on himself, the Clarkstown Police Department announced on Saturday. In a wealthy Massachusetts enclave, police found the bodies of a couple and their 18-year-old daughter on Thursday — prosecutors described the scene as a "deadly incident of domestic violence."And in Hawaii, a 33-year-old Instagram influencer was fatally shot in front of her young daughter on December 22 — the suspect, her estranged husband, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound shortly after.Christmas Eve appeared to be particularly deadly.In Arizona, the widower of a well-known prosecutor fatally shot his girlfriend and her mother, then himself. In Texas, Corpus Christi police found the bodies of a 49-year-old man and his 15-year-old son killed in another suspected murder-suicide. That same day, the three children of a Southern California couple reported their parents missing — authorities found the pair several days later, dead inside their vehicle.According to the National Institute of Justice, a murder-suicide occurs when one intimate partner — often male — kills the other partner and then takes their own life. When children are also killed in the act, the murder-suicide is referred to as familicide.Murder-suicide perpetrators are typically middle-aged men with access to firearms, experts say
Due to the rarity of murder-suicides, the US does not keep an official database tracking their frequency.Dr. Alexander Tsai, a board-certified staff psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told Business Insider that murder-suicides are difficult to study for that reason — the rate is fewer than one per 100,000 people annually.Tsai said the perpetrators are typically men in their 40s or 50s, and the precipitating event is often a separation or divorce. Unlike other types of violent perpetrators, such as mass shooters, murder-suicides are often committed by people who are employed full-time, Tsai said.They're "not people in their basement, on Twitter, going down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories," Tsai said.The National Institute of Justice has identified four common characteristics in murder-suicides:- prior history of domestic violence,
- access to firearms,
- threats,
- and a prior history of mental illness or substance abuse.