Tonya Thomas was thirty-three and lived at Port St John, in Brevard County, Florida, near Cape Canaveral, with her four children: Pebbles Johnson, seventeen; Jaxs Johnson, fifteen; Jazzlyn Johnson, thirteen; and Joel Johnson, twelve.
At about three in the morning on Tuesday May 15, 2012 she sent a text message to a male colleague asking him to tell her mother what had happened and saying that she wanted to be cremated with her children. A sheriff's lieutenant, Tod Goodyear, said afterwards that the message showed it was premeditated.
She began shooting about ninety minutes later. Three of the children got out of the house and ran to a neighbour's, one of them bleeding, and said their mother had shot them.
The 911 recording is the part of this case that is hardest to read. The neighbour was uncertain who was shooting: she said she heard one child say the youngest had shot their mother, and then that the children told her husband their mother was shooting at them. She refused to let them in, and can be heard on the recording telling them to get back and that they were not coming into her house. Her husband told the dispatcher that the children were frantically trying to get inside, that he did not know who had the gun, and that he was armed but was not going out there and putting himself in danger. When he did go out with his gun he saw one child bleeding at the front door.
Thomas then came outside and called for her children to come home. They went back. She fired the fatal rounds, smoked a cigarette, and later shot herself. Deputies found three of the children dead inside the house and the fourth in a neighbour's front yard. The authorities said they did not know why the children had obeyed her.
The medical examiner's report recorded nineteen gunshot wounds in all, including her own. She used a Taurus .38 calibre revolver, which holds five or six rounds, so she reloaded. One child was shot seven times. The youngest was shot five times from more than two feet away. The revolver was fired against the chest of at least two of them.
An earlier version of this entry said there had been reports of concern about the household in the years beforehand. The record is more specific and, in one respect, the opposite. A Department of Children and Families investigator had spoken to Thomas and the children weeks earlier and found no sign that the children were in distress; each of them said they felt safe at home. Investigators had talked to neighbours and school staff and watched the children at home, and reported that they appeared bonded to their parents. A supervisor signed the case off on May 13, two days before the shootings.
The documents released afterwards did establish a long history of domestic violence. In 2000 the children watched their father, Joe Johnson, shout at Thomas for not making dinner and then punch and kick her into a wall. They were removed from the home for a month and returned over the objections of the department. The papers record that Thomas herself had been abused or neglected as a child, and that she was not verbally or mentally abusive to her own children. Johnson was not living at the house, and an investigator had written the month before that she did not have a relationship with a partner supportive of her ability to protect and nurture her children. Reporters could not reach him afterwards.
No motive was established. Goodyear said a bad part of the investigation was that they might never get the why, and that unless she had left a note or told someone she may have taken it to the grave. The department's spokeswoman said the files offered a glimpse inside the home but did not appear to contain the answer.
These were the worst homicides in Brevard County since 1987.
The thirteen-year-old's name appears as both Jazzlyn and Jazlin in the reporting.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.