Autopsy says 2 girls’ mom killed herself
A woman who was fatally shot along with two children at an upscale home near Leon Springs in far Northwest Bexar County last week took her own life, an autopsy has found.
The Bexar County medical examiner’s office ruled the death of Nichol Olsen, 37, a suicide, Sheriff Javier Salazar said Monday.
The deaths of the two children were ruled homicides. Investigators are still trying to determine who killed them, Salazar said.
The two girls were Olsen’s daughter Alexa Montez, 16, and a 10-year-old who has not been positively identified. She is presumed to be a second daughter of Olsen.
Court records show that Olsen, a hairstylist, was the mother of a 10-year-old girl named London Bribiescas. Authorities are consulting dental records as they try to positively identify the child.
Salazar took the unusual step of assuring the public that his agency will continue its investigation without being swayed solely by the medical examiner’s findings.
“We owe it to the public and to the vic-
tims in this case — and their families, of course — to continue this investigation,” Salazar said in a briefing to reporters Monday.
Nicole Baptiste, 35, of San Antonio, a close friend of Olsen for eight years, vehemently disputed the finding that Olsen’s death was a suicide. Olsen would not have killed herself and would not kill her children, Baptiste said.
“Nichol loved those girls more than anything in the world,” Baptiste told the San Antonio Express-News on Monday. “Nichol lived for those kids. She worked all day, she got off on time every single day to pick them up from school, to take Alexa to cheer, to take London to tutoring, to pick them up.
“She wasn’t sad. She wasn’t depressed. She wasn’t suicidal. She didn’t think that way. She never talked about that.”
Olsen had made plans to take her 10-year-old daughter to auditions for the NBC TV show “America’s Got Talent” this past Friday, Baptiste said. She also intended to take care of her brother’s daughter Saturday.
Olsen had canceled all her work appointments for the week last Tuesday, which Baptiste said she found strange. But the night before her death, Olsen scheduled two appointments with clients for Thursday morning — the same morning her body was found, Baptiste said.
Salazar said investigators recovered a weapon from the house in the 11300 block of Anaqua Springs, which is inside a gated community of luxury homes known as Anaqua Springs Ranch. He declined to give more specifics about that weapon.
The sheriff also would not reveal if a suicide note was found.
All of those who died were found in upstairs rooms of the residence, but Salazar declined to give more details on their exact locations.
The shootings were discovered around 9 a.m. Thursday when the homeowner, who also lives at the residence, returned and found the bodies of Olsen and the children. That homeowner, who was romantically involved with Olsen, reported that he had stayed elsewhere the night before, Salazar said.
The homeowner has been “very cooperative” with the Sheriff’s Office since the beginning of the investigation, Salazar said. But sheriff’s officials are still working to verify his story that he stayed somewhere else the night before.
“We’re not going to stop investigating until we verify that,” Salazar said.
The homeowner has not responded to the Express-News’ requests for comment since Thursday.
The deaths occurred in what could be considered a fairly unusual location for homicide investigators. The residence where Olsen and her two daughters lived and where the bodies were found is valued at almost $1 million and sits on 2.7 acres. Many of the homes nearby are worth at least that much or more.
Salazar said his investigators are working around the clock on the case, including during their days off. He noted that the public has reached out to him personally and to his investigators through social media to urge them not to allow the medical examiner’s findings to dictate the course of their investigation.
“I want to point out that the medical examiner’s findings are independent of what we may eventually find as we continue to conduct this investigation,” Salazar said Monday. “Ours is a separate, but concurrent, investigation.”
Sheriff’s investigators will pore over video surveillance footage captured by neighbors, social media posts, cellphone records, text messages and cellular tower data showing the locations of cellphones of people involved in the case, Salazar said. They will also consult GPS technology showing the location of people’s vehicles.
Investigators also will review the results of gunshot residue tests and toxicology reports for the victims, Salazar said.
“This case is definitely far from over. We’ve really just begun,” he said.
Salazar urged anyone with information that may be helpful to the case to contact the Sheriff’s Office at 210-335-6070 or at BCSOTips@bexar.org.
“They may have a screenshot in their possession of some of the social media used by at least one of the decedents in this case,” Salazar said. “We’d like to see that. If there was any communications between anybody in the general public and anybody involved in this case ... we would like to see that information.”
“Nichol loved those girls more than anything in the world.” Nicole Baptiste, friend of Nichol Olsen