Jonathan Walker, the Queens father who police say shot his girlfriend and two children before shooting himself, did so out of jealousy, the New York Post reports.
According to the news site, sources said that the 34-year-old was overheard at a liquor store on Friday night telling people that his girlfriend and common-law wife, Shantai Hale, was cheating.
“He believed she may have been cheating on him—possibly with more than one person,” a law-enforcement source said. “He went and got drunk that night before heading home.”
So after getting boozed up, Walker reportedly didn’t go to his job on Friday evening, instead going to his girlfriend’s house in the early Saturday-morning hours and shooting Kayla, his 7-year-old, and 12-year-old Christina.
“He wanted to kill the two kids because he didn’t want them in foster care,” the source said.
Walker then went into another room and fatally shot Hale and Hale’s mother, Viola Warren, before killing himself in his car outside JFK International Airport.
Christina survived the shooting but is in serious condition.
According to the Post, the 12-year-old was put in a medically induced coma after undergoing surgery to open her skull in order to ease brain swelling.
“The doctors are hopeful,” an uncle, Silford Warren, told the Post “Thank God the bullet passed through the part of her head that it did. She moved her head backward at just the right moment when [her father] fired, and that probably saved her life.”
Christina was the one who called 911 after her father’s rampage and opened the door for first responders.
“He destroyed a whole family,” Hale’s cousin Joseph Simmons said. “There are no words to describe how angry the family is. He is a loser. He is a coward.”
Read more at the New York Post.