Guadalupe Ronquillo-Ovalle was thirty-three and lived at Rice, in Navarro County, about forty miles south-east of Dallas, with her husband Israel Alvarez, also thirty-three, and their three sons, aged four, eight and ten.
On September 11, 2013 she went to her children's primary school to call the emergency number, because her husband had taken her mobile telephone and removed the battery. She told a deputy that she had been on the phone to her sister when Alvarez came into the room and pushed her. He was arrested, spent two days in the county jail, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanour charge of family violence assault, and paid a fine of three hundred and sixty-seven dollars.
An earlier version of this entry said there was a documented history of domestic violence in the household, recorded without a finding as to its direction. That understates what the record shows. There was one documented incident, eight days before the killings, and she was the complainant in it. The sheriff said investigators could determine little from the arrest beyond that it was an isolated incident of family violence, and that they could only assume there had been problems in the household.
She filed for no divorce, sought no restraining order and asked for no protective order.
On September 16 the couple went to the home of a family friend, Maria Franco, to ask for advice about keeping their relationship together. Franco said they talked about normal problems and that she heard nothing dangerous.
The killings happened late on Thursday September 19 or early the following morning. The children did not go to school on the Friday. On the Sunday evening, after several failed attempts to reach the family, Alvarez's father got into the house by putting a ladder up to a first-floor balcony, and found all five of them.
Each of the four had a gunshot wound to the upper torso and she had a single wound to the head, from a .22 calibre semiautomatic rifle. There was no indication that Alvarez had fired any shots, and none that anyone had tried to get out of the house. She left no note.
The sheriff, Elmer Tanner, said publicly that in about twenty-five years in law enforcement he could not recall a case in which a mother had shot her own children. A month afterwards he told the Associated Press that his office was still trying to separate a possible motive from rumour, that it was waiting on DNA results, and that there was a difference between something that could be substantiated and something that was just a whisper in the wind. He would not say when the case might be closed.
The executive director of the Violence Policy Center, Josh Sugarmann, said family murder-suicides usually follow an event that makes the person lose control, such as financial trouble or domestic violence, and that men are usually the shooters: by his organisation's count of news reports, women commit about one in ten.
The Dallas Morning News set the case beside two others in north Texas. In 2010 the mayor of Coppell, Jayne Peters, killed her nineteen-year-old daughter and herself after financial difficulties, with antidepressants found in the house. And about six months before this case, at Mesquite, Angelica Vazquez shot her two adult children and her husband and then herself; police said she had withdrawn from her family, missed occasions she would normally have attended, and refused suggestions that she get professional help. That case is also in this archive.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.