Two found dead in apparent murder-suicide in Kennedale, according to police
Two people are dead after an apparent murder-suicide at a Kennedale senior living apartment complex, according to online records from the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
The deceased were identified by the medical examiner as 61-year-old Bernice Pritchard and 63-year-old Rickey Lynn Perry. Pritchard died from multiple shotgun wounds, and her death was ruled a homicide. Perry’s death was ruled a suicide from a shotgun wound to the head.
Kennedale police officers responded to the apartments in the 300 block of South New Hope Road on Nov. 30 after receiving a call for a welfare check from Pritchard’s daughter Leila Brooks, according to a search warrant.
Brooks told dispatchers she had been unable to contact her mother for several days and that her mother lived with Perry, according to the warrant.
Pritchard and Perry were engaged, and Pritchard had told her daughter that Perry “wasn’t very nice,” the warrant states.
When officers entered the apartment, they found Pritchard and Perry deceased in the bedroom, according to the warrant.
Pritchard was “the embodiment of strength, compassion and love,” and was a dedicated nurse who “worked tirelessly to build a better future for herself, her children, and her grandchildren, always putting others before herself,” Brooks wrote on a GoFundMe page created for her mother’s funeral expenses.
Brooks described her mother’s killing as an act of domestic violence, according to the GoFundMe.
The apparent murder-suicide was the second such crime in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex over the past week: Two people died in a similar shooting Dec. 2 at an apartment complex in Morningstar Drive in The Colony, police said.
The Medical Examiner’s Office identified the couple killed in The Colony as 45-year-old Kevin Duffy and 43-year-old Kristi Duffy. The man’s wound was self-inflicted, and the woman’s death was a homicide, authorities said.
This story was originally published December 6, 2024 at 7:41 PM.
