Why So Many American Fathers Are Killing Their Entire Families

Montgomery Township police received a call at 2:59 p.m. on Thursday, October 1; an unidentified person asked officers to check on the people inside a house on Wild Azalea Lane, in the Skillman section of the New Jersey township. Officers went to the door but got no answer so they left.Police returned the next evening and entered at about 5:52 p.m., when they made a horrifying discovery.In separate bedrooms, officers found Lora Grodnick, 62, and her daughter, Sloane, 24, dead with apparent gunshot wounds, according to the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office. Lora Grodnick’s husband, David Grodnick, 61, was also dead in the home with a firearm wound. The medical examiner ruled the women’s deaths homicides, and Grodnick’s a suicide.Grodnick had worked for 18 months as a senior vice president and underwriting counsel at a commercial title insurance firm. Sloane Grodnick was pursuing a master’s degree in art. The county prosecutor, John P. McDonald, calls the case an isolated incident with no threat to the public, and the investigation is still open.Researchers who study such crimes say the trigger is rarely one thing and often arrives suddenly.“Often there has been a recent change in circumstance that is intolerable to him, and he sees himself as responsible for his family,” a professor of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, tells The New York Sun.What makes a father decide that no one in his family should outlive him? And why is this happening more and more in America?Nine Murder-Suicides a WeekThe Grodnick deaths came weeks after a summer in which family killings kept coming.At Muscatine, Iowa, on June 1, police say Ryan McFarland killed six members of his family, ages 13 to 51, then killed himself on a city trail while officers were talking to him. On August 11 at Winfield, Kansas, Ronald Williams Sr., 53, called 911 and told dispatchers he had killed his entire family. Officers found six people dead: Williams, Kelly George, 44, and four children between the ages of 3 and 9. Williams had a long criminal record.Twelve days later, on a Sunday evening near Billings, Montana, Alan Smith, 44, opened fire at his family’s weekly dinner, weeks after his parents had asked him to move out, a relative said. Eight people died, including four children, across four generations, from a 7-year-old girl to a great-grandmother in her 90s. A 12-year-old, Charlotte Ghekiere, called 911 before she died but failed to save her family. Smith had no arrest or charge on record in Montana or Washington.Those are not isolated cases.A database kept by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University had counted 22 mass killings this year in America by late August, and a criminologist who oversees it said 15 stemmed from family disputes, well above the usual share of about half. The Muscatine, Iowa, case was the sixth family mass killing of the year, with nine more to follow in less than three months. The data cannot say why.Killings of that size draw the headlines, but they are a small slice. The Violence Policy Center’s latest study, built from news reports over the first half of 2025, found 237 murder-suicides, or nine a week, and estimated 1,052 deaths for the year. In 92 percent of cases, the killer was a man. In 65 percent of cases, an intimate partner was among the victims, and 80 percent took place in the home. Forty-five of the homicide victims were children or teenagers, and 27 more young people survived after witnessing some part of the violence.Researchers at Columbia University who studied 30 states from 2016 through 2022 counted an average of 820 murder-suicide deaths a year, a rate nearly double earlier estimates. The rate was highest in Alaska and Arizona and lowest in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.The TriggerMen commit almost all of these crimes. A review by the National Institute of Justice calls a history of domestic violence by far the most dominant risk factor, and says the triggering event is often a woman’s announcement that she is leaving.The motives vary, and the history is often hidden.“There may be a history of intimate partner violence as well, but often it’s unrecorded, no arrest history,” Dr. Friedman tells the Sun.She points out that the partner knows, yet others may not. Some fathers are depressed and suicidal, she explains, and some are psychotic. However, Dr. Friedman cautions that “many, many people have mental health issues or relationship problems or financial difficulties and would never dream of killing their family.”A study of 71 family annihilations reported in British newspapers between 1980 and 2012 found that fathers committed 59 of them, and 55 percent of those men were in their 30s. The Birmingham City University researchers found that family breakup was the most common cause, at 66 percent, and that 71 percent of the killers were employed.Dr. Friedman observes that individual cases can carry warning signs. “In a lot of cases, we see huge new financial strain or relationship breakdown including a contentious custody case, or acute mental health symptoms,” she explains.Why a Gun Changes the EndingThe weapon is the common thread. Of the 237 murder-suicides the Violence Policy Center counted, 87 percent involved a firearm, as did 35 of the 37 with more than one homicide victim. The Columbia team found that nearly 90 percent of the suicides in these events involved a gun. Federal researchers say access to a gun is a major risk factor in family killings because it lets a man act on rage and impulse.Among abusers, those with a gun are five times likelier to kill their partners than those without one.“We know that most murder-suicides, not specifically men committing familicides, involve a firearm,” a public health analyst at the Violence Policy Center, Terra Wiens, tells the Sun. Of nine male family annihilators identified in a study, “eight used firearms to kill their family members.”Dr. Friedman agrees that access to firearms “is an important piece of the puzzle. Because when you think of a mass murder event, firearms tend to be more lethal than other accessible methods.”Gun rights advocates counter that a firearm is the great equalizer, the one tool that lets a smaller or weaker person stand up to a stronger attacker, and that defensive uses go largely uncounted. The size of that count is hotly disputed.A National Academies review found estimates ranging from just over 100,000 defensive gun uses a year to more than 2.5 million, and researchers have argued for decades over which end is closer to the truth.The cases that advocates point to are not hard to find. At a mall outside Indianapolis in July 2022, a gunman had shot five people, killing three, when a 22-year-old shopper carrying a pistol, Elisjsha Dicken, shot and killed him. The chief of police said many more people would have died had Mr. Dicken not acted within the first two minutes.Closer to the subject of this story is Debra Hood of Nashville. She says her boyfriend, Carlos Washington, had her by the throat in a parked car when she raised her gun and fired. Mr. Washington died. Metro police said their investigation supported her self-defense claim.Meanwhile, at Skillman, investigators are still working, and the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office is asking anyone with information about the Grodnick deaths to contact its Major Crimes Unit. Authorities have not said what set it off.The question hanging over Wild Azalea Lane hangs over every house in this story: Could anyone have seen it coming, and what would it take to stop the next one?No one offers a single fix, yet the proposals overlap.The Violence Policy Center’s study calls for stronger domestic violence laws, programs that help men cope with anger, control and separation, and removing guns from people with a history of domestic violence or threats of suicide. It also wants the federal government to make its murder-suicide data public. The Columbia University team says prevention has to be tailored state by state, across gun laws, mental health care and the response to domestic violence.Dr. Friedman’s answer is wider, and less about any one law. Most people facing money trouble, a collapsing marriage or a custody fight never hurt anyone, she stresses, which is why the crime is so hard to see coming.“Mental health treatment and substance abuse treatment should be available to access, but there is another piece of social stressors and another of partner violence history that need to be addressed too,” she says.Prediction is hard, Dr. Friedman continues, because the warning signs are common and the crime is rare, but she says anyone with a concern should seek help.“If someone has a concern about their partner or loved one, getting help is obviously important,” she adds.

Why So Many American Fathers Are Killing Their Entire Families

Why So Many American Fathers Are Killing Their Entire Families

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