A California father killed his son before killing himself in a murder-suicide over the weekend, investigators say.
Both were found dead by sheriff’s deputies with the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office on the night of Friday, June 17, 2022.
The grim discovery was made inside of an apartment in Crockett, Calif., a census-designated place in the East Bay region of the broader San Francisco Bay Area which is located due south of the Carquinez Strait, according to Oakland-based Fox affiliate KTVU.
The cause of death has yet to be released. Similarly, law enforcement has not released information about an alleged motive.
According to KRON, deputies were responding to a report that two people were dead inside of the residence. But it is unclear who made the call.
“They had every road blocked off, except for right there,” neighbor John Dine, who was reportedly out walking his dog when police arrived, told the TV station, “And they had police all around here.”
The gruesome discovery occurred just after 8:30 p.m. on Friday night, KTVU reported, and the two appeared to have been dead for several hours before law enforcement arrived. Homicide detectives and crime lab technicians were brought to the scene to help with the investigation and the sheriff’s office deemed the incident a murder-suicide.
Details in the case are presently scarce but social media posts appear to support law enforcement’s theory of the violence.
“My husband killed my 7-year-old baby, then himself,” a woman identified as the suspected killer’s wife wrote in one Facebook post, according to KTVU. In another post, she reportedly identified the man as “The Monster.”
The TV station did not report the woman’s name, they said, because the sheriff’s office had yet to identify the two deceased individuals by name. Those posts no longer appear to be publicly accessible.
Jeremiah Sattes, another resident of the small, suburban community, also spoke with KTVU about the unusual police presence on the night in question. He first figured it was something else entirely.
“I thought it was a chase from Vallejo, and then I was out walking my dog and there were about eight to ten cop cars all in this area over here. And I thought they chased somebody into the school or something,” he said. “Later on that night I read a story and saw that they taped off the whole area and it was a gruesome discovery.”
“It breaks my heart that a kid, a family lost two individuals,” he continued.
A third neighbor, who declined to be identified, reportedly told KTVU the family was “troubled but did not elaborate.”
In addition to the numerous murder-suicides that have occurred across the country over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, a double murder suicide in San Jose, Calif. — the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area by both population and size — left three adults dead and left six children orphaned earlier this month.
[image via screengrab/KTVU]