A police sergeant, his wife and their two sons – ages 10 and 12 – were found dead in a suburban home in New York in what police said was a triple murder-suicide.
Watson Morgan, 49, a sergeant with the Bronxville police department, fatally shot his wife, Ornela Morgan, 43, and their sons before dying by suicide, police said. They were discovered just past midnight Saturday at the family’s home in Clarkstown – 18 miles north of Manhattan – after Morgan failed to show up for work at the police department in nearby Bronxville.
“At this phase in the investigation, it is believed that Watson killed his wife and two children, prior to killing himself with a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the Clarkstown police department said in a statement.
All four members of the family had gunshot wounds, police said, and all were pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators recovered a handgun at the home.
Though police described Morgan’s killing of his wife and their children as a murder-suicide, such crimes since the 1980s have been known as Family Annihilations.
Communities often view such crimes as isolated tragedies, especially in the US. But an Indianapolis Star investigation found there had been an average of one Family Annihilation in the US every five days since 2020.
Most likely explanation is mounting debt or other financial issues that seemed impossible to solve. That’s the most common source of family annihilation. Unless you live in Russia and are a billionaire…
Since it was a cop it’s most likely the end state of domestic violence.
Bankrupcy seems like a better alternative than murdering your entire family, tho
Or hell, if you can’t handle that and think bankruptcy would be horrible and suicide is the only option, don’t take your family out with you. How fucking arrogant do you need to be to think that your family couldn’t go on without you (assuming one of the more generous motivations)?
100%. Those kids could have had a good life
Well, if they just inherit their dead dad’s debt, would that be a “good life?” Assuming a financial situation is why this occurred. If both parents die is the debt expunged or passed to next of kin? If the debt is passed, they would be forced to declare bankruptcy early in their life (destroying their credit), which destroys a lot of options like college, car ownership, etc.
By no means am I saying this is the better option, just seems like both were quite shitty outcomes to me
You can’t pass debt onto a child in the US. The only way that happens is inheritance/assets (say they have a house they owned and $100k in the bank then the creditors can lay claims to that) but if there’s nothing but debt then the debt dies with them
It COULD pass to the spouse, but only if it’s debt jointly incurred during the marriage
Debt isn’t passed on to children. His spouse would have had to take it (unless it was structured specifically such that she wouldn’t), I’m not aware of inherited debt being a thing anywhere in the west.
Searching is a bit difficult because there’s a lot of “false positives” from articles talking about how inherited debt isn’t a thing unless you co-signed a loan or want an asset with secured debt attached to it (like a house with a mortgage). So I can’t say for sure that it’s not a thing anywhere in the west but can say that’s the case for Canada and USA, at least.
You don’t inherit debt…
I’d say just about anything seems better than murdering your entire family. But people come up with weird solutions when under duress.