Louisiana pastor shoots woman in front of their children before turning the gun on himself, police say

A Louisiana pastor shot his wife in front of the couple’s three children before turning the gun on himself at a Mississippi hotel on Wednesday.

He is locally credited as Danny Prenell Jr., 25, the chief pastor of the Bright Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church in Pineville, Louisiana. Multiple Facebook posts identify his wife as Gabby Prenell, 27. The couple have three children together.

In a Facebook post sent from the Hampton Inn hotel where the shooting took place, Prenell captioned a photo with his wife and children: “I may not be a perfect man, but I will always be a family man.”

A photo of the scene published by The Business Magazine showed blood-stained floors close to the elevators in the hotel lobby in McComb, Mississippi. The shooting happened around 3:30 p.m. Prenell allegedly shot his wife twice and then himself, investigators said.

Authorities have not commented on the condition of Prenell or his wife. A Facebook post from a friend of Gabby’s said the mother was “still fighting” in an intensive care unit.

Both were rushed to the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Their children have been placed with child protection.

According to Prenell’s Facebook page, he is a former sheriff’s deputy with the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Department until December 2022.

On April 6, Prenell paid tribute to his wife on her birthday, calling her “my queen” and “the woman I love and to whom I owe my life.”

“I’ve watched you grow on all levels and you are an amazing mother, wife and my best friend. I am proud to be your husband, for you are a woman of class, discretion, integrity, and above all… you are a woman of God,” he added.

The pastor regularly spoke about his self-growth in Facebook posts.

“At 25, I often hear that I am way above my age. However, I am never satisfied with where I am… I am constantly looking for more,” he wrote on April 16.

“Small-minded people keep you locked into what fits in their heads. The God I serve has no limit, and I remain faithful because I know my cup will overflow,” he added.

Domestic shootings have become a disturbingly common tragedy across the country. They’ve happened on average nearly every 3.5 weeks for the past two decades. In 2022 there were 17, according to a databasecompiled by multiple media organizations.

Ten were murder-suicide, and 14 were shootings. The database defines a mass murder as killing four or more people, not counting the attacker.

Sequatchie, Tennessee, is one of more than 30 communities shaken by a family massacre in the past two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty, sparing no race or class.

A mass murder in a family — killing four or more people, not counting the perpetrator — has occurred each of the past two years in places as big as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona.

Motives can remain speculative in family murders where attackers commit suicide, but police often cite financial or relationship problems as causes.

Family murders immediately grab the attention of people in a community, but rarely receive the national attention that mass murders at schools, places of worship or restaurants receive, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied family and mass murders. murder for decades.

Fox, who helped compile and maintain the database for the AP and USA Today, said it’s because it doesn’t instill the same kind of fear in the public. He noted that police often issue messages shortly after the murders are discovered saying there is no danger to the public.

“It’s a nice, safe community, but family massacres are separate from the crime rate in the area,” he said. “We’re talking about internal factors, and I think that’s why it’s hard for people to see themselves in these situations and why the response is to grieve rather than fear.”

In fact, family mass murders are the most common form of mass murder, accounting for about 45 percent of the 415 mass shootings since 2006, according to the database. They are twice as common as mass shootings that kill members of the public.

Most, but not all, involve handguns, only about a third involve households with a previous incident of domestic violence, and most attackers have no violent history or criminal record, Fox said.

There is no government agency that tracks murder-suicides on a national level, so a few years ago policy analysts at the Violence Policy Center—a nonprofit educational organization that researches and educates about violence in the US—started tracking details of news reports to find a annual report.

The latest 2020 version looked at murder-suicides, including many mass murders in the first six months of 2019.

The study found that 81 percent of murder-suicides occurred at home and 65 percent involved intimate partners.

The study also found that of the 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 where a person killed their children, partner and themselves.

Fox said most homicides fall into two categories. The first is murder by proxy, where the killer is motivated by anger or spite and kills the children who are seen as an extension of their partner.

The second is suicide by proxy motivated by despondency or depression, usually the loss of a job, and the attacker kills the children as an extension of themselves.

“He wants to spare them the misery of living in this horrible world,” Fox said. “Over the years there has been an eclipse in the community. Decades ago, there was a time when if you were struggling to feed your family or if you lost your job, neighbors would come over with casseroles and offer emotional support. Many people don’t know their neighbors anymore these days.’