LOS ANGELES — A man fatally shot his wife, five young children and himself, claiming in a note he faxed to a TV station Tuesday that the couple had just been fired from their hospital jobs and together planned the killings as an escape for the whole family.
“Why leave our children in someone else’s hands,” Ervin Lupoe wrote to KABC-TV.
The station called police after receiving the fax, and a police dispatch center also got a call from a man who stated, “I just returned home and my whole family’s been shot.”
Officers rushed to the home in Wilmington, a small community between the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, about 8:30 a.m. and found the bodies.
All were shot in the head, some multiple times, Coroner’s Assistant Chief Ed Winter said. The killings may have occurred between Monday evening and early Tuesday, based on neighbors’ accounts of firecracker sounds, he said.
Ana Lupoe’s body was found in an upstairs bedroom with the bodies of the couple’s twin 2-year-old boys. The bodies of an 8-year-old girl and twin 5-year-old girls were found alongside Ervin Lupoe’s in another bedroom.
It was the fifth mass death of a Southern California family by murder or suicide in a year. Police urged those facing tough economic times to get help rather than resort to violence.
“Today our worst fear was realized,” said Deputy Chief Kenneth Garner. “It’s just not a solution. There’s just so many ways you find alternatives to doing something so horrific and drastic as this.”
Kaiser Permanente Medical Center West Los Angeles released a statement confirming both Lupoe and his wife had worked there; both were medical technicians.
Lupoe’s letter indicated that Lupoe and his wife had been investigated for misrepresenting their employment to an outside agency in order to obtain child care.
“It looks like they might have had grounds for his termination. . . . It wasn’t that he was laid off as a result of the economic situation,” police Capt. Billy Hayes said.
