Hawaii police said on Sunday they were investigating what appears to be the murder-suicide of a family, including three children, by its patriarch at a Honolulu home.
Despite police’s description of the incident as a murder-suicide, such crimes since the 1980s have been known as family annihilations. Communities – especially in the US – often perceive those crimes to be isolated tragedies.
However, an Indianapolis Star investigation found there had been an average of one family annihilation somewhere in the country every five days since 2020.
Police investigating Sunday’s case first arrived at the home in the Honolulu neighborhood of Manoa at 8.30am but left after no one answered the door, Lt Deena Thoemmes said at a news conference. She explained police were responding to an anonymous person’s call and had no cause to enter the home.
Officers returned at 9.15am after receiving another call and entered after speaking with a caller. They found four people who had been fatally stabbed.
The dead were a wife and three children aged 10, 12 and 17. The husband also was found dead.
A preliminary investigation showed the husband fatally stabbed his wife and children, Thoemmes said. She added the husband’s cause of death was under investigation.
The ages of the adults was not immediately known, and the names of the dead had not been publicly released as of early Monday.
There was no history of domestic calls to the residence, and police did not have a motive for the killings, Thoemmes said.
Witnesses reported there had been an argument in the home early on Sunday morning, police said.
The five deaths mark the state’s worst mass killings since the Xerox murders on 2 November 1999, when Byran Koji Uyesugi fatally shot seven co-workers, including his supervisor, the local police chief Joe Logan said.
Logan predicted Sunday’s scene would affect officers, “as it would any officer, for the rest of their lives”.
In 94% of such cases, family annihilators are male, and they often die by suicide, according to the Star’s investigation.
Sunday’s case was unusual in the fact that guns are used in 86% of family annihilations. But with no centralized database for family annihilations available, the crimes’ characteristics and prevalence are not generally well known at the academic level.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
