Father kills 4 children, two others in Houston
SPRING, Texas — A father who authorities say went on a shooting rampage at a suburban Houston home, killing four of his children and two adults and wounding his 15-year-old daughter critically, has surrendered after a standoff and is in custody, police said.
Investigators plan to charge the man yesterday, a day after the rampage in a usually quiet middle-class subdivision in Spring, Texas, said Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Thomas Gilliland.
Gilliland described the dead as two boys, ages 4 and 14; two girls, ages 7 and 9; a 39-year-old man; and a 33year-old woman. The gunman and his wife are estranged, and she lives out of state, he said. All of the children were theirs, while two were adopted.
Gilliland said the wounded daughter identified her father as the gunman. After a brief chase, the man held deputies at bay for three hours before he surrendered.
The teenager was able to call 911 and later warned deputies that her father planned to go to her grandparents’ home to kill them, Gilliland said.
The sheriff’s department said precinct deputy constables were called to the house in the northern Houston suburb of Spring about 6 p.m. Wednesday and found two adults and three children dead. Another child later died at a hospital.
“It appears this stems from a domestic issue with a breakup in the family from what our witness has told us,” Assistant Chief Deputy Constable Mark Herman of the Harris County Precinct 4 Constable’s Office told reporters. He did not explain further.
Authorities also did not release the identities of the victims or the suspect, nor did they say whether the adults who were killed were related to the children or their father.