3 people found shot dead in murder-suicide at west Fort Worth apartment, police say
Three people were found shot to death in a west Fort Worth apartment early Tuesday in what police called a murder-suicide.
Police did not release the names of the victims, their ages or the relationship between them, but investigators said the killings were domestic-related. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office on Wednesday identified one of the victims as Holly Marlene Beverly, 39, who lived in the apartment where she was killed.
This is the second domestic violence murder-suicide in Tarrant County in as many weeks where multiple people were killed. As of Tuesday, six people in Fort Worth and Arlington had been shot to death in domestic violence incidents.
“A domestic violence abuser blames his partner, and kills them,” said SafeHaven of Tarrant County President and CEO Kathryn Jacob in a Tuesday telephone interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “It’s uncommon they kill a neighbor or a child of a partner, but it happens. And it’s very heartbreaking.”
Fort Worth police responded to a call just before 12:30 a.m. Tuesday to the Westland Estates Apartments in the 2900 block of Jonah Drive.
When they went inside of Beverly’s apartment, officers discovered the bodies of three people. The victims had apparent gunshot wounds, police said.
Homicide detectives and crime scene units responded to the scene and are investigating.
Fort Worth police did not release any other details.
A neighbor across the breezeway who declined to give her name told the Star-Telegram she heard banging and shouting around midnight. A man was yelling for someone inside to “give me my boy, give me that boy,” she said.
There was a moment of quiet, then she said she heard a shotgun blast.
“It sounded like it was right next to me inside my living room,” she said.
She said she looked out her door after police arrived to find the area littered with shotgun shells. The door to the apartment looked as if it had been shot in by the gun.
A neighbor told Star-Telegram media partner WFAA-TV that he heard gunshots and two young children ran out of the apartment where the shooting took place. Those children appeared unhurt and waited with neighbors until police arrived.
Last week, Arlington police found a woman, her teenage son and her ex-boyfriend dead in an apartment after a neighbor called 911 to report another woman in the apartment complex who was shot in the head and unconscious in a car.
Arlington police said in that incident Christopher Baker, 36, shot the two women and the teenage boy before turning the gun on himself. Authorities identified the victims as 43-year-old Chasity Williams and her 15-year-old son, Damajay Joseph Williams, who was a Mansfield High School student. The woman found injured in the car was expected to survive, police said.
Later that week in Fort Worth, a man was shot by his girlfriend’s teenage son after the man hit the woman with a car in a domestic dispute, police said.
Help for victims of domestic violence
Domestic violence victims in Tarrant County should call SafeHaven’s hotline at 1-877-701-7233 or 911 for emergencies.
Jacob said COVID-19, alcohol abuse and unemployment have been factors in abusive relationships.
“But it’s still on the shoulders of a domestic violence abuser,” Jacob said. “That person is the one who causes the abuse.”
In 2019, eight victims were killed in intimate-partner homicides in Tarrant County, according to statistics from SafeHaven of Tarrant County.
That number could be higher for 2020. Authorities are still reviewing 21 cases in 2020 that could be classified as intimate-partner homicides.
During the pandemic, SafeHaven officials were answering as many as 90 calls per day on their hotline telephone lines. On average, SafeHaven gets about 65 calls a day.
Jacob pointed out that not every call means a victim needs shelter. Some calls came from relatives or friends who wanted to find out what they could do to help someone who was in an abusive relationship.
But the COVID-19 pandemic just fueled the abusers.
“We had one abuser force his partner to sleep in the car because he didn’t want to catch the virus,” Jacob said. “In another case, one victim had to wash her hands until they bled.”
The number of calls to SafeHaven is back down to its average of 65 so far in 2021, but Tarrant County shelters still remain almost full, Jacob said.
The violence from abusers was especially evident during the freezing week that Texas had in late February. One offender burned all the belongings of a victim to keep warm and another abuser burned the victim’s shoes, making her walk barefooted on frozen ground to get anywhere, according to Jacob.
“And here comes summer,” Jacob said. “Generally, the highest number of victims are in shelters in the summer because it’s the time victims leave their partners as they have waited for the end of school to leave.”
This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 8:57 AM.
