At about 6:30 on a Saturday morning in March 2013, someone called Mesquite police to report gunfire at a house in the 1400 block of Paintbrush Street. Officers checked the outside of the house, saw no sign of forced entry and nothing out of place, and could not raise anyone inside. A neighbor told them she had heard and seen nothing unusual. They came back twice that day and still got no answer. On Wednesday, March 13, the same officers returned, found newspapers and mail piling up at the door, and went in. The four members of the Vazquez family were dead inside, and had been, police said, since the weekend.
The dead were Marcelo Vazquez, forty-four, a long-haul truck driver; his wife, Angelica, forty-three; and their two children, Paulina Belen Vazquez, twenty-one, and Alejandro Roman Vazquez, eighteen, known as Alex. A 9mm handgun lay on the floor of the master bedroom near Angelica's body. The Dallas County Medical Examiner ruled the deaths of her husband and children homicides and hers a suicide: she had shot all three and then herself.
Both children were in college. Paulina had spent a year at Eastfield College before transferring to the University of North Texas, where she was majoring in criminal justice; she lived off campus and had come home for spring break. Alex had graduated from Mesquite High School the year before and was in his second semester at Eastfield, where his professors admired his work ethic and his friends found him funny, a little goofy at times. Eastfield's president announced the deaths to the college and opened its counseling service to students. Gustavo Herrera, who had taken Paulina to her senior prom, said it had seemed to him simply a happy family.
Reconstructing the night, investigators found that her husband and children had been drinking and that Angelica had not joined them. When the others changed for bed, she stayed dressed in her shirt, jeans and belt. The shooting followed, in the early hours of Saturday, March 9. Some accounts date it to March 8, the Friday night it began.
Police found no note, and no motive was ever released. There were no records of domestic violence at the address. Friends and relatives said she had not been herself since a cancer diagnosis. The police spokesman, Lt. Bill Hedgpeth, said she had withdrawn from family occasions and refused to seek counseling, and the autopsy showed she had undergone a hysterectomy and a double mastectomy for breast cancer. She had worked since 2005 as a cafeteria aide at an elementary school in the Mesquite Independent School District and resigned at the end of the school year in May 2012. Friends described her before her illness as deeply religious, outgoing and happy; Herrera said his first thought had been that Marcelo, who could be gruff, must have been the shooter.
A memorial of stuffed animals and flowers grew at the family's mailbox, with a note giving the time of a service, and the funeral for all four was held that Sunday at a funeral home in Mesquite. The case was a single act of familicide, one of three in North Texas that year in which a mother killed her children and then herself.