Yet another murder/suicide:This time, it's the father...
From USA Today
Father kills 3 kids, self outside mother's home
THROCKMORTON, Texas (AP) — The estranged wife of a man who fatally shot their three children and then committed suicide in a car outside her home said he had threatened to kill the family before.
"I told him I wanted a divorce and that's when he pulled the gun," Beth Smallwood, 33, said Sunday of her husband, James D. Smallwood Jr.
In an interview with The Associated Press, she said her husband was supposed to return their children — Corie, 10, Casey, 4, and Chase, 3 — to her home Sunday evening.
Instead, police said, he shot the three children as they sat in his car Saturday night, then drove to his estranged wife's house, which she shared with her parents, and shot himself.
Beth Smallwood said she and her mother were on the front porch when James Smallwood drove up the gravel driveway in his mother's Cadillac.
She called 911 when he began honking the horn, apparently trying to get her to walk out to the driveway, said Clay Gober, Beth Smallwood's brother. James Smallwood shot himself a short time later.
Beth Smallwood said she had filed for divorce in November but it hadn't been finalized.
After months of hearings following their separation, a judge granted her husband unsupervised visitation rights in January, a decision she was critical of Sunday.
"I begged him for his help because I was worried about the kids," she said.
A telephone message left at Judge Rae Leifeste's home was not immediately returned Sunday afternoon.
In Throckmorton, a town of 1,000 about 120 miles west of Dallas, residents said they were shocked to hear of the killings.
Ron Sadler, a dispatcher with the Throckmorton County sheriff's department who took the 911 call, said the killings were the first for Throckmorton in the seven years he had worked for the sheriff's office.
At the First United Methodist Church that Beth Smallwood's family attends, congregants recalled seeing her two daughters perform in a Christmas show, dressed in long white robes with white angel wings.
"The thing I remember is her clutching those three precious children," church member Elizabeth London said.
Scott Hogue, principal of the Throckmorton schools, described Corey, who was a fourth-grader, as "a sweet little girl" who always had a smile on her face. The other daughter would have been in kindergarten next fall, he said.
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