A gunman shot dead his wife, daughter and two other people before killing himself in Alabama, while a resident of a Korean religious retreat in California killed one and wounded another in the latest series of murders that have shocked the US.
The body of Kevin Garner, 45, was found on Tuesday near the home he formerly shared with his estranged wife in Morgan County, Alabama.
Law enforcement agents said Garner had earlier gunned down his wife, his daughter, a sister and her nephew in the town of Greenhill, reports said.
The killings came ahead of a divorce hearing between Garner and his wife Tammy due to take place on Wednesday.
Garner’s sister had been due to testify on behalf of his estranged wife at the hearing, the Times Daily newspaper reported on its Web site.
In Temecula, California, police said John Chong, 69, shot one woman dead on Tuesday night and wounded her husband before being disarmed during a struggle with another couple.
Chong had lived at the Kkottongnae Retreat Camp, which helps the homeless, for about a year as a volunteer after moving from the Los Angeles suburb of Lynwood.
The two couples attacked were also resident volunteers.
Detectives, having trouble piecing together what happened because many witnesses speak only Korean, were unable to immediately determine a motive.
“We have no evidence that this was a domestic dispute. We do not have a motive or reason for this incident,” sheriff’s Sergeant Michael Lujan said on Wednesday.
The camp, about 136km southeast of Los Angeles, is marked by a simple white sign along a two-lane road that winds through the hills of the Temecula wine country. The retreat, which provides food and aid to the homeless, is run by Korean nuns.
Chong is a retired professional welder who did maintenance at the retreat and was always welding, building walls, digging holes and pouring concrete, said Chuck Owens, 69, who lives nearby and saw him Tuesday.
“He came up and he seemed normal,” Owens said. “He came up for a while and we sat around for a while. I noticed nothing.”
Chong is unmarried and has no children, he said.
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
FOREST SITE: A rescue helicopter spotted the burning fuselage of the plane in a forested area, with rescue personnel saying they saw no evidence of survivors A passenger plane carrying nearly 50 people crashed yesterday in a remote spot in Russia’s far eastern region of Amur, with no immediate signs of survivors, authorities said. The aircraft, a twin-propeller Antonov-24 operated by Angara Airlines, was headed to the town of Tynda from the city of Blagoveshchensk when it disappeared from radar at about 1pm. A rescue helicopter later spotted the burning fuselage of the plane on a forested mountain slope about 16km from Tynda. Videos published by Russian investigators showed what appeared to be columns of smoke billowing from the wreckage of the plane in a dense, forested area. Rescuers in
‘ARBITRARY’ CASE: Former DR Congo president Joseph Kabila has maintained his innocence and called the country’s courts an instrument of oppression Former Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) president Joseph Kabila went on trial in absentia on Friday on charges including treason over alleged support for Rwanda-backed militants, an AFP reporter at the court said. Kabila, who has lived outside the DR Congo for two years, stands accused at a military court of plotting to overthrow the government of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi — a charge that could yield a death sentence. He also faces charges including homicide, torture and rape linked to the anti-government force M23, the charge sheet said. Other charges include “taking part in an insurrection movement,” “crime against the
RSS