Six people, including two children, are killed and one is injured in Tennessee murder-suicide

Six people, including two children, are dead in rural Tennessee following a horrific suicide bombing that took place Thursday night.

Marion County Sheriff Bo Burnett described the scene as “one of the worst I’ve been involved in in my entire career as a law enforcement officer.”

The incident occurred around 8 p.m. in the small community of Sequatchie, about 30 miles west of Chattanooga. That’s what a neighbor, Sylvia Cooper, told me WTVC that she heard glass breaking and then about five gunshots.

Shortly afterwards, flames could be seen coming from the house. Firefighting teams from several municipalities arrived on site to extinguish the fire.

At least two people have died from smoke inhalation. There was one survivor, an adult, who was rushed to a local hospital. Among the deceased are the children’s mother and grandmother.

“It’s a domestic situation, apparently going on for a long time. We’ve confirmed six people are dead. They were removed from the scene and taken to Nashville for an autopsy. The scene has been turned over to the TBI,” Sheriff Burnett told the media.

Police say the perpetrator set fire to the house after shooting some family members, two of the victims died of smoke inhalation

Marion County Sheriff Bo Burnett described the scene as “one of the worst things I’ve seen”

“This is one of the worst things I’ve seen. You hear about these things, but this is one of the worst I’ve been involved with in my entire career as a law enforcement officer,” the sheriff added.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is leading the investigation. The sheriff said there is no further threat to the community and everyone involved in the incident has been held accountable.

The victims were taken to Nashville for autopsies.

Family massacres 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% 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.

Michael Haight, 42, shot dead his wife, her mother and the couple’s five children after being investigated for child abuse in one of the most notorious murder suicides in recent years

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.’