- Police only made this gruesome discovery after deploying a drone that hovered above the house
Five members of the same family were found shot dead Sunday in a gruesome murder-suicide that unfolded in their home in Washington state.
The Clark County Sheriff's Office said deputies found the bodies at a home in Orchards, Washington, after receiving a call from another family member who said they a text from a person at the house saying they had harmed people there.
Police used a drone to look inside the home and saw people who appeared to be dead, the station reported. Law enforcement officers and a paramedic team entered the home at that time, where all five were confirmed deceased.
The Southwest Washington Regional SWAT team responded due to the threat of a firearm and entered the home with emergency medical personnel, but all five adults inside were dead, KGW8 reported.
Officials have confirmed there is no further threat to public safety. The victims have not been named.
A SWAT team was called to the area after it was determined a crime involving a firearm had been committed
Clark County Sheriff's Sergeant. Chris Skidmore told the media that all the victims are adults
Clark County Sheriff's Sergeant. Chris Skidmore told the media that all the victims are adults.
The sheriff's office said the deaths in the community about 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of Portland, Oregon, appeared to be a murder-suicide, the station reported.
The Orchards section of Vancouver has a population of approximately 20,000 and is statistically one of the safest areas in Washington.
With this tragedy, Vancouver, Washington, joins more than thirty communities rocked by a mass killing of families over the past two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty and spares no race or class.
A mass murder of families — in which four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator — has occurred each of the past two years in places as big as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona, a database compiled by USA Today, the Associated Press and Northeastern University shows.
Motives can remain speculative in family murders where the attackers commit suicide, but police often cite financial or relationship problems as causes.
The shooting took place here in the Orchards section of Vancouver, Washington, one of the safest communities in the entire state
Mass killings of families are in fact the most common form of mass killings, accounting for about 45% of the 415 mass killings since 2006, according to the database. They are twice as common as mass shootings that kill civilians.
Most, but not all, cases involve handguns, only about a third involve households where there has been prior domestic violence, and most attackers have no history of violence or criminal history.
There is no government agency nationally that tracks murder-suicides, so a few years ago policy analysts at the Violence Policy Center — a nonprofit education organization that conducts research and provides public education about violence in the U.S. — began tracking details of news accounts to prepare an annual report. report.
The latest 2020 version looked at murder-suicides, including many mass killings in the first six months of 2019.
The study found that 81% of murder-suicides occurred at home and 65 percent involved intimate partners.
The research also found that among murder-suicides in which more than three people were killed in addition to the attacker, six out of 10 during those six months were incidents in which someone killed their children, partner and themselves.