Montgomery Township police received a call at 2:59 p.m. on Thursday, October 1; an unidentified person asked officers to check on the people inside a house on Wild Azalea Lane, in the Skillman section of the New Jersey township. Officers went to the door but got no answer so they left.
Police returned the next evening and entered at about 5:52 p.m., when they made a horrifying discovery.
In separate bedrooms, officers found Lora Grodnick, 62, and her daughter, Sloane, 24, dead with apparent gunshot wounds, according to the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office. Lora Grodnick’s husband, David Grodnick, 61, was also dead in the home with a firearm wound. The medical examiner ruled the women’s deaths homicides, and Grodnick’s a suicide.
Grodnick had worked for 18 months as a senior vice president and underwriting counsel at a commercial title insurance firm. Sloane Grodnick was pursuing a master’s degree in art. The county prosecutor, John P. McDonald, calls the case an isolated incident with no threat to the public, and the investigation is still open.
Researchers who study such crimes say the trigger is rarely one thing and often arrives suddenly.
“Often there has been a recent change in circumstance that is intolerable to him, and he sees himself as responsible for his family,” a professor of forensic psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, tells me.
What makes a father decide that no one in his family should outlive him? And why is this happening more and more in America?
