A police sergeant, his wife and their two sons – ages 10 and 12 – were found dead in a suburban home in New York in what police said was a triple murder-suicide.
Watson Morgan, 49, a sergeant with the Bronxville police department, fatally shot his wife, Ornela Morgan, 43, and their sons before dying by suicide, police said. They were discovered just past midnight Saturday at the family’s home in Clarkstown – 18 miles north of Manhattan – after Morgan failed to show up for work at the police department in nearby Bronxville.
“At this phase in the investigation, it is believed that Watson killed his wife and two children, prior to killing himself with a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the Clarkstown police department said in a statement.
All four members of the family had gunshot wounds, police said, and all were pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators recovered a handgun at the home.
The Bronxville police chief, Christopher Satriale, said the killings left the department with “profoundly broken hearts at the senseless loss of innocent lives”.
A neighbor, who declined to be identified, told the New York Post that the family were “textbook, perfect American”.
“I never in a million years would expect he would do something like this,” the neighbor added. “The kids were always out here playing outside, and their mom was just the sweetest person you ever met.”
Though police described Morgan’s killing of his wife and their children as a murder-suicide, such crimes since the 1980s have been known as family annihilations.
Communities often view such crimes as isolated tragedies, especially in the US. But an Indianapolis Star investigation found there had been an average of one family annihilation in the US every five days since 2020.
In 94% of those cases, the family annihilator was a male, and guns were used 86% of the time, according to the newspaper investigation.
Family annihilators also often die by suicide, and common risk factors include prior domestic violence, substance abuse as well as access to guns. However, with no centralized database for family annihilations available, the crimes’ characteristics and prevalence are generally unknown at an academic level.