The incident occurred on Thursday night in the tiny community of Sequatchie, around 30 miles west of Chattanooga.
A neighbor, Sylvia Cooper, reported hearing glass shatter and around five gunshots before flames were seen coming from the home. Fire teams from multiple communities were called to extinguish the fire. At least two people died from smoke inhalation, and one adult survivor was rushed to a local hospital. The deceased people include the children's mother and grandmother. Marion County Sheriff Bo Burnett described the scene as "one of the worst I've been involved in all my career as a law enforcement officer."
According to Sheriff Burnett, the incident was a domestic situation that had been ongoing for some time. "We have six people confirmed dead. They have been removed from the scene and taken to Nashville for an autopsy. The scene has been turned over to the TBI," he told the media. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is taking the lead in the investigation. The sheriff stated that there was no further threat to the community and everyone involved in the incident had been accounted for. The victims have been taken to Nashville for autopsies.
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Family mass killings have become a disturbingly common tragedy across the country, with nearly one happening every 3.5 weeks for the last two decades. In 2022, there were 17 of them, according to a database compiled by multiple media organizations. Ten were murder-suicides, and 14 were shootings. The database defines a mass killing as four or more people slain, not including the assailant.
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Sequatchie, Tennessee, is one of more than 30 communities sent reeling by a family mass killing in the last two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty and spares no race or class. A family mass killing, where four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator, happened each of the last two years in places as large as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona. Motives can remain speculative in family killings in which assailants take their own lives, but police often cite financial or relationship issues as the causes.
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Family mass killings immediately capture the attention of people in a community but rarely garner the level of national attention received by mass killings at schools, places of worship, or restaurants, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied familicides and mass killings for decades. Fox, who helped compile and maintain the AP and USA Today database, said that's because it doesn't carry the same kind of fear with the public. He noted police often issue messages saying there is no danger to the public shortly after the killings are discovered.
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"It's a nice safe community, but family massacres are independent of the crime rate in the local area," he said. "We are talking about internal factors, and I think that's why it's hard for people to see themselves in these situations and why the response is to mourn instead of fear."
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Family mass killings are, in fact, the most common type of mass killing, making up about 45% of the 415 mass shootings since 2006, according to the database. They happen twice as frequently as mass shootings in which members of the public are killed. Most, but not all, involve handguns, only about a third involve households with a previous occurrence of domestic violence, and most of the assailants have no violent history or criminal past, Fox said.
No governmental agency is tracking murder suicides nationally, so a few years ago, policy analysts at the Violence Policy Center began tracking details from news accounts to produce an annual report. The latest version from 2020 looked at murder-suicides, including many mass killings, during the first six months of 2019. The study found that 81 percent of murder suicides happened at home, and 65 percent involved intimate partners.
The study also found that among murder-suicides, where more than three people aside from the assailant were killed, six of the ten during those six months were incidents in which a person killed their children, partner, and themselves. Fox said most of the killings fall into two categories. The first is murder by proxy, in which the killer is motivated by anger or resentment and kills the children seen as an extension of their partner. The second is suicide by proxy, inspired by despair or depression, most often a job loss, and the assailant kills the children as an extension of themselves.
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"He wants to spare them the misery of living in this awful world," Fox said. "Over the years, there's been an eclipse in community. There was a time decades ago if you had trouble feeding your family or if you had lost your job, neighbors would come over with casseroles and they would offer emotional support. Many people don't know their neighbors these days."
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