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.
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.
I thought family annihilation was an outsider killing an entire family. I think I’ve only ever heard murder suicide be used for parents killing children/spouses. It seems like the news is trying to make this even more inflammatory than it already is.
When I was a kid, I’d hear the older women in my family says ‘It takes a special woman to marry a cop’.
When I asked why they said it was because you never knew if they were coming home that day.
Different era.
The real reason is because you’re almost guaranteed to become a domestic violence statistic.
Most likely explanation is mounting debt or other financial issues that seemed impossible to solve. That’s the most common source of family annihilation. Unless you live in Russia and are a billionaire…
Bankrupcy seems like a better alternative than murdering your entire family, tho
I’d say just about anything seems better than murdering your entire family. But people come up with weird solutions when under duress.
Since it was a cop it’s most likely the end state of domestic violence.
