Nobody had come or gone from the rented white frame house on Poplar Street in Phillipsburg for four days. That was what the neighbors told the Clay Township police when they called on Saturday, February 11, 2006: a dog was barking inside, the lights were off, and the family car had not moved from where it was parked. Before officers arrived a woman looked through a window and saw one of the boys. Michael Hines, who lived across the street, put his shoulder to the front door and broke it open.
He found four-year-old Chole Love first, in his pajamas in an easy chair in the living room. Through the gap under a door he could see another body on the floor, and a pistol was lying on the couch. Hines backed out of the house. The boy's father went in after him, reached his son in the chair, and came straight back out.
Inside were Tonya Lynn Hawks, thirty, and her three sons: Chase Love, five, Chole, four, and Hunter Hawks, two. All four had died of gunshot wounds to the chest. Chase and Hunter had each been shot twice and lay in pajamas in the bed in the master bedroom. "It looked as if they had been put to bed," said Sheriff Dave Vore. Chole had been shot once. Their mother was on the bathroom floor with a single wound, and the Montgomery County coroner, Dr. James Davis, said it was possible that it had not killed her at once. The gun was a High Point .380 semiautomatic, and she had bought it on January 30, eight days before the shootings.
For the first day the sheriff's office would not say who had fired it. The house was secure and there was no sign of a struggle, but the autopsies on Sunday established only that all four had been shot, and Major Ed Copher said investigators were still trying to learn whether one of the four had killed the others or whether someone else had killed all four. There was no sign of forced entry. They questioned several people, among them her boyfriend, who had recently moved out, and the separate fathers of the boys, and found nothing to hold against any of them. The answer turned up in a child's backpack: a page-long note, addressed to no one in particular, telling a family member how to handle her personal business. On February 22 Dr. Davis announced that she had shot the boys and then herself on February 7, and that the note had helped confirm it.
She had moved to the house, a single-story rental on a two-lane highway through a village of a few hundred people in northwest Montgomery County, in the late summer of 2005, with the boyfriend and the three boys. Both adults worked at a car plant in Dayton, about fifteen miles to the southeast.
The Dayton Daily News went through the court records that spring and found a life under strain. Her home in Dayton had been lost in bankruptcy. The boyfriend was at least her third failed relationship in five years, and neighbors said he moved out on the day she killed the children. She was two weeks away from a final divorce decree from Brent D. Hawks, Hunter's father, and their wedding anniversary would have fallen on Valentine's Day, one week after the shootings. A friend, Wayne Owens, said money had been a problem for her from the day he met her, "even though she made good money at the plant."
None of it satisfied the people who knew her, who described a mother who lived for her boys and usually took trouble in stride. "This is not the Tonya I knew," one friend told the paper. No motive was ever released, and the note, as described by the coroner's office, gave instructions rather than reasons.
Two details are reported differently. The coroner's office gave her age as thirty; the Associated Press, writing the day after the bodies were found, said thirty-one. The middle boy's name is Chole in the coroner's account and Cole in the sheriff's first identification of the children.