6 RELATIVES DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE AT TEXAS HOME

Six people were found fatally shot in a suburban Dallas home early Monday after police say two brothers made a pact to kill four family members and themselves.

Officers in Allen went to the home for a welfare check at around 1 a.m. after getting a call from a friend of one of the brothers who feared he was suicidal, said police Sgt. Jon Felty.

“It appears that the two brothers had entered into an agreement, they were going to complete suicide,” Felty said.

Felty said one of the two brothers wrote a lengthy post on social media in which he said he and his brother had a plan to kill their family members and then themselves. He also wrote that all of his decisions were based on weighing pros and cons, including the decision to kill his family.

Police found the six family members dead in the home. Felty said the dead included the two brothers, a sister, their father and mother and a grandmother. Felty said the those dead ranged in age from 19 to mid-70s. He said the slayings likely happened over the weekend.

Felty said they were not releasing the names of the victims. He said the deaths were being investigated as a murder-suicide but he could not yet say who shot whom.

The brother who wrote the social media post says in it that he has been cutting himself more frequently recently and that as of late his treatment for depression — which included counseling and medication — didn’t seem to help him as much as it had previously, Felty said.

In the post, he also spent “a lot of time” writing about his disappointment with how the TV series “The Office” ended, Felty said. “He thought it should have ended much differently and he was upset.”

The brother who wrote the social media post also said in it that he thought it was too easy for his brother to obtain a firearm, Felty said.

A mass killing where two siblings are the perpetrators is rare, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University.

The Associated Press/ USA Today/Northeastern University Mass Killing Database has recorded 452 incidents of mass killings — the slaying of four or more people — from 2006 through Sunday, he said. He said nearly half of those — 217 — were killings where someone killed their family members.

He said 207 of those involved a single perpetrator.