What is going on? How can kids experience this and go to school the next day? What about the children?
For the second time in 24 hours, Detroit Police are investigating the shooting deaths of a mother and a boyfriend and young children left alone in the home.
A relative found a 3-year-old and an infant in a home on the 12300 block of Santa Rosa just after 9:30 a.m. today, their mother and her boyfriend dead from what investigators believe were gunshot wounds, Detroit Police Deputy Chief John Roach said. Investigators are trying to determine whether the deaths were a double homicide or the result of a murder-suicide, Roach added.
Juanye Jackson said he doesn’t believe his uncle, Vashon Peterson, 37, could be responsible for killing his girlfriend with their 2-month-old daughter and the little girl’s 3-year-old brother in their two-flat house at 12344 Santa Rosa.
Jackson, 31 of Dearborn, said his grandmother called this morning, asking him if he’d talked to Peterson.
“She said she just called and his little man answered the phone and said, ‘My mommy’s on the floor dead and my daddy’s gone,’” Jackson said. “I just can’t see my uncle killing her — he loved her to death- – and killing himself, and especially doing it around his kids. He loved his kids. He just had a baby girl. He loved his family.”
Peterson’s brother, Marc Posey, 38, of Detroit, said he agreed.
“He loved his kids,” Posey said, waiting outside the police tape surrounding the home on Santa Rosa between Courtland and Fullerton just west of Livernois. Other family members surmised that robbery could be a motive for a double murder, after Peterson recently cashed a tax refund check.
The couple was found in two separate rooms in the upstairs flat of the two-family home with the children unharmed, Roach said. At about 11 a.m., investigators bundled the baby and 3-year-old up in fleece blankets, put them into the back of a dark sedan with municipal plates and drove away.
The shooting is the second time in 24 hours two people have been killed by gunfire with kids on the house on Detroit’s west side.
In a shooting unrelated to today’s, an 8-year-old girl called 911 Monday night to report that her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had been shot in their home at Glastonbury and Vassar, near 7 Mile and the Southfield Freeway, police said.
The girl, who was upstairs with her 6-year-old half-sister, called for help after hearing talking then gunshots in the basement just before 9 p.m., Roach said. The house had been ransacked but there were no signs of forced entry, leading police to believe the victims knew their assailants, he said.
Source: BY TAMMY STABLES BATTAGLIA AND ZLATI MEYER, DETROIT FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS
