Police identify four killed in Markham
Victims immediate family of man facing four counts of first-degree murder
The four people found dead in a Markham home Sunday are the mother, father, sister and maternal grandmother of the man now facing four first-degree murder charges, according to friends of the family.
Following autopsies, York Regional Police confirmed Wednesday the victims are: Firoza Begum, 70, Momotaz Begum, 50, Moniruz Zaman, 59, and Malesa Zaman, 21, according to a news release.
Their cause of death has not been determined and will not be released as the case is before the courts, police added. Menhaz Zaman, 23, was charged with four counts of first-degree murder Monday after the bodies were found at a house on Castlemore Ave. Sunday afternoon. The police have not confirmed his relationship to the victims.
Police received a call just before 3 p.m. “that there might be some people injured in the residence” on Castlemore Ave., just east of Mingay Ave., police spokesperson Const. Andy Pattenden said Sunday.
“When our officers arrived, they located a man at the front door, had an interaction with him and he was taken into custody,” Pattenden said.
Officers then found the four bodies inside the home, he said.
“Familicides” — where multiple family members are killedby a family member — are rare events. The most common homicide involving family members is an intimate partner homicide, most often a man killing his current or former female partner.
According to Statistics Canada, there were 30 cases of alleged parricide — the killing of a parent by a son or daughter — nationally in 2018. Figures from the past decade show there are about two dozen such cases per year, ranging from 21 in 2010 to 34 in 2013 and 2017.
Alleged murders by a sibling are less common, with seven recorded cases in Canada in 2018, six in 2017 and a decade high of 13 in 2010 and 2011.
Statistics Canada does not specifically track cases of familicide, where a perpetrator is alleged to have killed multiple members of their own family.
The typical and most researched familicide involves a male head-of-household who kills his entire family for purported prosocial purposes after his termination from a job or after a divorce as his identity changes, according to Phillip Shon, a criminology professor at Ontario Tech University, who researches intra-family homicide and parricide (the killing of a parent or close relative). Some of these cases are murder-suicides, resulting in little information being released publicly by police in Ontario.