On Thursday, March 15, 2012, Christine Adewunmi was assessed at a Mercy hospital in the St. Louis area and admitted to an outpatient psychiatric program that was due to start at eight the next morning. She did not go. By the following afternoon she and her three daughters, Lauren, eight, Samantha, six, and Kate, three, were dead at the end of a gravel road by the Meramec River, about eighty miles southwest of St. Louis, each with a single gunshot wound and a handgun close by.
She was thirty-seven. She had grown up in the St. Louis area, graduated from Kirkwood High School under her maiden name, Pannett, and taught physical education at Parkway North from December 1998 to June 2006 before staying home with the girls, who all went to Oak Brook Elementary in the Parkway district. Neighbors in the Ballwin subdivision off Arbor Bluff Circle remembered her outside playing with the children or driving them to their activities. One neighbor, pulling away in her car early on the Friday afternoon, waved to her in the yard and later said she could not get the smile on Christine's face out of her mind.
Her husband, Leonard Adewunmi, forty-two, a managing partner in a commercial property firm, had left for work that morning while his wife and daughters were asleep. He came home at six to an empty house, called her cell phone more than twenty-five times, and reported the family missing. What he told the police is on the missing person report. His wife had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was depressed, and he was afraid she was suicidal. She had been looking at websites about depression and suicide, had recently seen a therapist, and had been referred to a hospital for evaluation. Twice before she had taken the children away and lied about where they had been; the girls told him they had been at a house by the water.
They were found at about one o'clock on the Saturday afternoon, March 17, on the edge of the Blue Springs Ranch near Bourbon, in Crawford County, a resort offering campsites, cabins, trail rides and float trips. The family was not staying there. The four lay beside the family's SUV at the dead end of a gravel road through a remote part of the property, and they appeared to have been dead for hours. Sheriff Randy Martin said at first only that it appeared it could be a murder-suicide; by the Monday his office and the Missouri State Highway Patrol had concluded that she shot her daughters and then herself.
Her family issued a statement calling depression a serious illness that is hard to comprehend. Nobody, they said, had known the depth of her problem or could have foreseen what happened, and relatives, friends and professionals had stood by her while she coped with the disease. They described Leonard as an involved, caring father who would miss cooking with Lauren, playing football with Sammi and singing to Kate, and asked for privacy for him.
Asked about the case at the time, Alan Berman, director of the American Association of Suicidology, said most people who commit murder-suicide are men, and that the cases in which a mother kills her children and herself are fewer and more complex. Some such mothers, he said, are under the delusion that they are protecting their children, believing nobody else can care for them, and that the children must stay with them even in death.
In July 2013 Leonard Adewunmi sued Mercy for wrongful death. His petition said the hospital had failed to conduct a proper intake interview, had not spoken to him or to her psychiatrists and therapist, had not told him she had been admitted to the outpatient program or that she failed to arrive for it the next morning, and had not recognized that she was a danger to herself and others. Had she been admitted as an inpatient on March 15, it claimed, her suicide would to a reasonable degree of medical certainty have been prevented. The petition gives March 16, 2012, as the date the girls died; the contemporary reporting and the death records circulated since give March 17, the day they were found.