Dad Kills Wife, Kids Before Turning Gun On Himself
AP LOS ANGELES – A man who fatally shot his wife, five young children and himself Tuesday had earlier faxed a note to a TV station claiming the couple had just been fired from their hospital jobs and together planned the killings as a final escape for the whole family. “Why leave the children to a stranger?” Ervin Lupoe wrote, according to KABC-TV.
How can anyone who claims to love his/her children believe that they would be better off dead than “left with strangers?” Do they think they will see them again in “heaven?” Not likely, after committing this totally selfish act! Whatever face these people put on such murder-suicide atrocities, the fate of being raised among “strangers” could not be worse than never getting the chance to live at all. There are plenty of people who were orphaned at a young age, but took the opportunities and challenges of life and made something of themselves.
Life is precious, especially to a child who has hardly lived! I could understand choosing to kill oneself and his family if all of them were facing a slow and painful death by radiation poisoning, or something else from which there was no hope of escaping. But murder-suicide as the solution to this temporary situation, which could have been worked through, cannot be justified. If life means having everything go smoothly, with no problems, no changes, no adjustments to make–if it means never having to pick oneself up and try again–then death is the easy way out.
But they didn’t ask the children, who soon could have been among new friends and family, and could have had the chance to grow up.
