On Sunday evening, September 22, 2013, after several days of trying and failing to reach his son's family, Manuel Alvarez put a ladder up to the second-floor balcony of their house near Rice, a small town in Navarro County about forty miles southeast of Dallas, and climbed in. He found all five of them dead. On the 911 call he told the dispatcher he thought it was suicide, that someone had left the natural gas on.
It was not gas. His son, Israel Chairez Alvarez, thirty-three, and his three grandsons, aged four, eight and ten, had each been shot once in the upper body with a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle. His daughter-in-law, Guadalupe Ronquillo-Ovalle, also thirty-three, had a single wound to the head. The shootings had happened late on Thursday, September 19, or early on the Friday; the boys had not gone to school that day. There was no sign that Alvarez had fired a shot, and none that anyone had tried to get out of the house. On September 24 the sheriff's office announced that preliminary autopsies showed the husband and children died of homicidal gunshot wounds and she of a self-inflicted one. She left no note.
Eight days before the killings, on September 11, she had gone to the boys' elementary school to call 911, because her husband had taken her cellphone and pulled out the battery. She told a deputy she had been on the phone with her sister when he came into the room and pushed her. Friends said the fight had been over messages on her phone. He was arrested, spent two days in the county jail, and paid a fine of $367 on a class C misdemeanor assault charge; most reports say he pleaded no contest, and one Dallas Morning News account says he pleaded guilty. She filed for no divorce and asked for no restraining or protective order. "We can only assume that there were problems in the household," Sheriff Elmer Tanner said, "and there may have been other incidents that were taking place."
On September 16 the couple went to the home of a family friend, Maria Franco, to ask for advice about keeping their marriage together, and talked, she said, about normal problems. Franco's son was the ten-year-old's best friend, and she had to tell him that his friend was in heaven. Close friends said the marriage had been rocky and that Ronquillo-Ovalle was suspicious and jealous. Others could not believe it of her at all. "I really don't think she did it," said Xenia Luebbano, who was in a Bible study group with her.
Tanner said that in about twenty-five years in law enforcement he could not recall a case in which a mother had shot her own children, and warned that a motive would be hard to find. A month later he told the Associated Press that he was still waiting for DNA results on evidence from the house and trying to separate what could be substantiated from what was just a whisper in the wind. He would not say when the case would be closed. No motive was ever announced, and with every person involved dead, there was nobody to charge. The boys' names were not released by the authorities.