A 16-year-old boy in New Mexico allegedly killed four members of his family and then drunkenly turned himself in Saturday, investigators said.
The New Mexico state police said in a Facebook post that the teen was arrested in Belén, a small city in Valencia county, after he called authorities late at night and informed them he killed his family.
When the police arrived, the boy – identified as Diego Leyva – walked out of his home with his hands in the air and in an “extremely intoxicated” state, according to a statement from investigators. Inside the home, officers said they found a gun on the kitchen table and the bodies of the deceased family members.
New Mexico state police said they arrested Levya and booked him as an adult on four counts of murder. He was also brought to a hospital to undergo detoxification while investigators and crime scene technicians prepared to interview him, police added.
Members of the Valencia county community expressed a sense of disbelief on Sunday after learning the identity of the accused killer. One of his former teachers said she was in disbelief that one of her students could have allegedly carried out such a horrendous act.
“I would never have thought that something like this would happen and that Diego would be capable of doing something like this,” Vanessa LaGrange told the Guardian. “Everyone’s in shock.”
The identities of the victims were not immediately released on Sunday. However, according to LaGrange, one of the victims is believed to be a student at a middle school where other students are planning to wear black and bring balloons to mourn.
Meanwhile, the fire chief for the Valencia county fire department, Matt Propp, said: “We have every reason to believe that one of the victims is a volunteer firefighter.”
The killings that unfolded on Saturday were consistent with the type of crime that since the 1980s has been referred to as a “family annihilation”. Saturday’s killings were the 29th mass murder in the US so far this year, according to statistics from the non-partisan Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass murder as one in which four or more victims are killed.
There is no centralized database for family annihilations that could provide insights into that kind of crime’s characteristics or prevalence. But the overwhelming majority of such cases involve a male killer armed with a gun who kills himself after murdering multiple close family members.
Local communities typically treat such cases as isolated tragedies, though a 2023 Indianapolis Star investigation found they had occurred across the US – on average – once every five days.
Annually high rates of mass shootings and mass murders in the US have prompted some in the country to call for more substantial federal gun control. But Congress has been unable or unwilling to implement such measures.
