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An Unthinkable Extreme of Domestic Violence: Killing Multiple Relatives

One horrific subset of such violence is the slaying or attempted slaying of multiple relatives and sometimes one’s entire family, an act so coldblooded that it can seem unthinkable. It is not...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.04.25 03:50 0

An Unthinkable Extreme of Domestic Violence: Killing Multiple Relatives

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An Unthinkable Extreme of Domestic Violence: Killing Multiple Relatives

The Shreveport, La., slaying of eight children was an example of what experts call family annihilation.

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A memorial set up in Shreveport, La., after a father killed eight children, seven of whom were his, according to the police.

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Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Christina Morales

April 24, 2026,

2:49 p.m. ET

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In early January, a man in Clay County, Miss.,

gunned down

six people, including his father, a brother, an uncle and a 7-year-old second cousin, officials say.

A shooter walked into a

hockey rink

in Pawtucket, R.I., in February and killed an ex-wife and an adult son and wounded three others, including the ex-wife’s parents, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

And in Shreveport, La., a father

killed eight children

on Sunday, including seven of his own, and wounded their two mothers before killing himself, according to the authorities. Henry L. Whitehorn, the sheriff in Caddo Parish, La., described the killings as “the most heartbreaking tragedies that we have ever witnessed.”

Domestic violence occurs with disturbing regularity in America. One horrific subset of such violence is the slaying or attempted slaying of multiple relatives and sometimes one’s entire family, an act so coldblooded that it can seem unthinkable. It is not common, but it happens enough that experts have a name for it: family annihilation.

To many of those experts, the definition of the term, also called familicide, involves the attempted killing of multiple relatives. Some family killings fall outside of that specific criteria but are no less shocking.

There is no publicly available comprehensive data on family annihilations. Gun violence prevention organizations, like the nonprofit

Violence Policy Center

, often rely on news reports to populate their databases, and some databases account for these killings in broader categories, such as murder-suicides or mass shootings.

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