No apparent motive, say police.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A man, with apparently no motive, and living in a luxurious part of town, killed a woman, his two children and wounded his father critically before killing himself inside a suburban Atlanta home early Wednesday.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Matthew Kyle Fields called his mother Wednesday morning to say he’d shot four people and planned to kill himself.
She tried to convince him not to commit suicide, but by the time she arrived at the house, he was already dead and deputies were already on the scene.
They found Rebecca Manning, 37, on her knees on the front porch screaming. She said she had been shot, but deputies couldn’t see her wound at first because she was shot in the back. She was taken to a nearby hospital but did not survive the ordeal.
Inside the home, Manning’s two sons — Jacob Smith, 9, and Jared Smith, 8 — were dead. Fields, 32, was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and Manning’s father was critically injured, police said. Jerry Manning, 75, remained in critical condition late Wednesday afternoon with multiple gunshot wounds.
We’d like to find a motive,” Forsyth County Sheriff Duane Piper said of the murder-suicide per USA Today. “There’s no reason that any of us are ever going to understand to wipe an entire family. We have absolutely no clue at this point what precipitated it.”
The area of the shooting, on Old Atlanta Road about 30 miles northeast of the city, includes some of metro Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhoods, reported the Associated Press. The road winds past golf course communities in a heavily wooded area.