A 78-year-old Florida man fatally shot his 21-year-old wife on Saturday, then set their home on fire and killed himself. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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The couple has not been identified by police, but Port St. Lucie authorities believe it is the second domestic murder-suicide in the city this September, news website TCPalm.com reported.
In the latest case, a neighbor of the slain couple told TCPalm.com that his wife got a 1 a.m. call from the suspected gunman Saturday asking if she could take the couple’s daughter from his house.
The neighbor, Steve Tango, said his wife took the 4-year-old girl to their house and then he called police.
Cops said that the 78-year-old man also called police and told them his gruesome plans.
“A white male called 911 and said he had just killed his wife and was going to kill himself,” police spokesman Tom Nichols told TCPalm.com. “Before he turned the gun on himself, he set the house on fire.”
Police arrived on the scene to find the woman shot in the head and her body partially burned.
The man appeared to have shot himself through the mouth with a revolver, cops said.
There was evidence that the inside of the home had been torched with gasoline, but it was not on fire when police arrived.
Tango told TCPalm.com that the man and his 4-year-old stepdaughter had come to his home for dinner on Friday night and that everything appeared to be fine.
“Something went wrong between 10 o’clock and 1 o’clock,” Tango said.
In another murder-suicide on Sept. 9, Sharon Fein, 44, was found shot to death in her bathroom, and cops suspect that her husband, Robert, 54, killed her before turning the gun on himself.
Robert Fein survived a shotgun blast to the face and has been clinging to life at a local hospital, according to local reports.
That case was still under investigation. As of late last week, Robert Fein had not been charged with his wife’s death.
The Feins had reportedly been going through a divorce.
The two murder-suicides this month are the latest tragedies to strike Port St. Lucie, a city of about 155,000 people on Florida’s Atlantic coast that was hit hard by the recent housing market collapse.
In July, Tyler Hadley, 17, was accused of bludgeoning his parents to death with a hammer in their Port St. Lucie home and then throwing a massive party while their dead bodies were locked in a bedroom.
Hadley was charged with two counts of first-degree murder last Wednesday.
He’s not eligible to face the death penalty because of his age.
