Two families — in South Carolina and Texas — killed in mass shootings only days apart
The country’s latest mass shooting has claimed the lives of a prominent doctor and four others, including two children, in South Carolina.
Dr. Robert Lesslie, 70, his wife Barbara, 69, and their young granddaughters were among those fatally shot at the family’s home in Rock Hill on Wednesday, according to The Rock Hill Herald. A man working at the home also died, and a sixth person was injured, police said.
What the community and local leaders are decrying as a “senseless tragedy” comes just days after a shooting that left a family of six dead in North Texas, sparking renewed discussions about gun control.
In the South Carolina shooting, former NFL player Phillip Adams was named as a suspect in the killings of Dr. Lesslie and his family, the Rock Hill Herald reported. A 12-hour manhunt led police to a home where authorities said Adams died by suicide.
“We are all shocked this could happen here in York County,” sheriff’s office spokesperson Trent Faris told reporters Thursday morning. “This is a mass shooting. Normally you think of a movie theater or a mall, but we’re treating this as a mass shooting because there were five victims killed.”
Authorities in Texas are investigating the shooting in Allen, about 30 miles north of Dallas, as a “murder-suicide pact.”
Officers discovered multiple family members dead inside a home Monday while conducting a welfare check, according to KXAS. Allen Police Department Sgt. Jon Felty said it appears that brothers Farhan and Tanvir Towhid killed their family before shooting and killing themselves.
“It looks like the two … sons entered into an agreement that they were going to [die by] suicide and that they were going to take their family members with them,” Felty said, KXAS reported.
Police identified the victims as 54-year-old dad Towhidul Islam; 56-year-old mom Iren Islam; 77-year-old grandmother Altafun Nessa; 21-year-old Tanvir Towhid; and 19-year-old twins Farbin Towhid and Farhan Towhid.
It was a family friend who contacted police after Farhan Towhid posted an 11-page letter to Instagram describing his struggle with depression and suicidal ideations, The Washington Post reported. The family immigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh 15 years ago, and their grandmother was in town visiting when the killings occurred.
“We just can’t believe it happened to this family,” family friend Sied Chowdhury told the newspaper. “They are a very loving family. We didn’t see anything wrong with the family, any problems.”
Investigations are continuing in both the South Carolina and Texas shootings, authorities said.
Mass shootings continue to rise across the U.S., including during the pandemic of 2020 and into 2021. The number of mass shootings increased to 611 in 2020, up from 417 in 2019, according to an analysis of Gun Violence Archive statistics by USA Today.
And through March 22 of this year, the number of mass shootings are “53% higher than the 1st-quarter average of the past four years.”
The Gun Violence Archive describes a mass shooting as an incident that injures or kills more than four people, not including the shooter.
The recent shootings come amid a spate of deadly gun violence across the U.S. A 9-year-old boy was among four people killed in a shooting rampage in Orange County, California last week.
The week prior, four family members died and a fifth person was injured in a shooting sparked by a fight over stimulus check money, McClatchy News reported.
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