A police sergeant, his wife and their two sons – ages 10 and 12 – were found dead in a suburban home in New York in what police said was a triple murder-suicide.
Watson Morgan, 49, a sergeant with the Bronxville police department, fatally shot his wife, Ornela Morgan, 43, and their sons before dying by suicide, police said. They were discovered just past midnight Saturday at the family’s home in Clarkstown – 18 miles north of Manhattan – after Morgan failed to show up for work at the police department in nearby Bronxville.
“At this phase in the investigation, it is believed that Watson killed his wife and two children, prior to killing himself with a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the Clarkstown police department said in a statement.
All four members of the family had gunshot wounds, police said, and all were pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators recovered a handgun at the home.
Though police described Morgan’s killing of his wife and their children as a murder-suicide, such crimes since the 1980s have been known as Family Annihilations.
Communities often view such crimes as isolated tragedies, especially in the US. But an Indianapolis Star investigation found there had been an average of one Family Annihilation in the US every five days since 2020.
*since 2020.
If my cowboy math is correct (assuming two parents and two children), that comes out to about 292 people per year or 876 since 2020.
With a population the size of the United States (330 million), that means that, for a given year, 0.00009% (rounded up) of that population dies as a result of a family annihilation. For comparison, around 40,000 people (including around 1,000 children) die in vehicle accidents annually in the US.
Not that family annihilations aren’t horrible. They are. But, from a purely statistical perspective, there are much more frequent horrible things that we don’t talk about as much, for a variety of reasons.
This sounds like an argument for public transit
I’m not sure I follow what point you’re trying to make… I’m not sure anyone was claiming that it was a significant number per capita or whatever, just that it is a lot, period. And it is.