Man kills daughter, then self, police say

11-year-old girl was terminally ill, undergoing chemo

She was the proud parents’ little girl whose health kept getting worse. The 11-year-old child was terminally ill, undergoing chemotherapy, and the cancer in her leg meant she soon would need to have it amputated.

The girl was home with her parents about 9 a.m. Monday when blasts of gunfire startled the mom making breakfast in the family’s home in the 14600 block of Southwest 18th Court.

The child’s disillusioned father had taken his girl’s life, shooting her before turning the gun on himself, police say.

“It was a devastating terminal illness,” Davie police spokesman Lt. Mark Leone said of the girl. “She was not going to get any better. … It is such a tragic situation, a terrible situation.”

The girl was the couple’s only child. The mom found her dead. The dad was taken to a hospital, where he died, Leone said. The mother was absolutely distraught.

“It is devastating,” Leone said of the father’s apparent murder-suicide. “It’s a lose-lose situation.”

The girl was born on May 10, 2009. It was Mother’s Day. Photos posted on social media from the girl’s early years paint a portrait of a happy, healthy little girl with loving parents. She performed in dance recitals. She did martial arts.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel isn’t identifying the girl or her family out of sensitivity to relatives whom police say they’re still trying to notify.

Family members said the little girl had cancer in her femur and that on Aug. 28, she was scheduled for an amputation in Boston. That day would have been her parents’ 27th wedding anniversary, records show.

Miriam Casanova, whose husband, Jorge, is the cousin of the little girl’s mother, said she and her husband have been wanting to call and check in with the parents more but often found themselves at a loss for words because the last phone call a few months ago was so difficult and sad.

During the phone call, the little girl’s father could barley speak through all the tears, Casanova said. “He couldn’t talk,” she said. “He just cried.”

Casanova said Angela had been doing chemotherapy.

The child’s parents were proud of their daughter. They each shared moments of the child’s younger years. On the father’s Facebook page, there’s an image of his little girl in a white dress, her hands are held in prayer, mostly likely the child’s First Holy Communion. There’s another of the the little girl getting an award for martial arts.

On the mother’s Facebook page are fun moments captured on a camera, such as when the mother and daughter posed for a selfie in December 2016, or the time that the little girl was kissed by a dolphin.

Recently an aunt to the little girl posted prayers on Facebook for a higher power to strip cancer away. That aunt declined comment Monday.

According to the father’s LinkedIn profile, he over the years served in executive positions at many air-conditioning, refrigeration and heating companies.

Murder-suicides involving caregivers are rare, experts say.

“It’s almost like a lightning strike,” said Scott Eliason, a psychologist at the Idaho Department of Corrections. “Usually these things are impossible to predict and even if someone has every possible risk factor you can think of for violence or suicide, in the vast majority of cases, they don’t do this.”

Instances of murder-suicides such as these are often a result of a caregiver wearing themselves out and getting depressed. The murder itself is sometimes an extension of the killer’s suicide, according to Eliason.

“Sometimes you get what’s called caregiver burnout where you have a caregiver taking care of a terminally ill person and that stress leads to some kind of depression,” he said. “They’re worried about abandoning the person, so that’s where the murder comes in.”

The shooting happened at the West Davie residence in the 14600 block of Southwest 18th Court shortly before 9 a.m., Leone said.

For nine hours after the shooting, the family’s tan home with an expansive and neatly manicured yard remained cordoned off with crime scene tape. Multiple police officers and crime-scene technicians remained on the scene.

At a little past 2 p.m. a silver truck headed up the long driveway, stopping at the walkway to the home. Some 15 minutes later, two people wheeled the gurney now covered by either a body bag or a tarp, back to the truck.