Man kills five children after wife threatens to leave
April 06, 2009 07:02am
A Washington state man shot and killed his five children, between the ages of seven and 16, then turned the gun on himself after his wife told him she was leaving him.
James Harrison, 34, killed his children early Saturday inside his mobile home in Graham, 100km south of Seattle, then drove to a nearby casino and shot himself inside his car, Pierce County sheriff Paul Pastor told reporters.
Harrison on Friday looked for his missing wife and found her at a convenience store with another man.
The woman said she was leaving Harrison to be with her new boyfriend.
Alerted by neighbours, police Saturday morning found the five children dead, some shot several times, inside the mobile home's bedrooms and one inside the bathroom.
Harrison was found inside his car, the engine still running, with a rifle shot to the head.
Sheriff Pastor described the crime scene on Sunday as a "horrible thing''.
"This was not a tragedy. It was a rotten murder,'' Sheriff Pastor said.
"This appears to be the terrible work of the biological father. If that doesn't break your heart, I don't know what does.''
The murders mark the latest spasm of gun violence in the United States which has been rocked by six fatal mass shootings in the past three weeks, including three police officers killed on Saturday by a 23-year-old man at his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Pittsburgh attack came a day after a recently unemployed man stormed an immigrant services centre where he had been learning English in Binghamton, New York and went on a murderous rampage, killing 13 people before taking his own life.
On March 29, a heavily armed gunman shot dead eight people at a North Carolina nursing home, days after six people were killed in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighbourhood in northern California's Silicon Valley.
And on March 10, an unemployed man killed his mother, grandmother and eight others on a vicious shooting rampage in Alabama.
Criminologist Jack Levin, of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, said there appears to be a link between the failing US economy and a rising body count.
"A mass killer is someone who has almost always suffered a catastrophic loss - that's the link between a recession and mass killings,'' he said, citing the loss of a job, money or a relationship.
"Catastrophic losses serve as inspiration, or precipitant,'' he said.
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