28-Year-Old Florida Mother Arrested on Suspicion of Shooting Daughter and Stepfather: Reports

Stock photo of a police car. (Shutterstock)

Police have arrested a 28-year-old woman suspected of shooting dead her daughter and stepfather in an apartment complex along Florida’s Treasure Coast.

According to local media reports, her mother is the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries following the shooting, which occurred at around midnight in Waterleaf Townhomes Apartments in the town of Port St. Lucie.

“In the late morning hours at around 10:30 am Port St. Lucie Police Detectives located and arrested 28-year-old Alyssa Marie Torres,” said the St. Lucie Police Department in a statement.

Alyssa Marie Torres (Port St. Lucie Police)

Several hours earlier, the police had initiated a man-hunt for Torres, describing her as armed and dangerous, as local media reported that she had shot her 8-year-old daughter and her stepfather overnight.

“Initial information provided to police revealed the suspect (28-year-old, Hispanic female, Alyssa Marie Torres) is involved and fled the scene in a 2005 Toyota Rav4, Silver in color bearing a Florida Tag of KPD -T14,” said Port. St. Lucie police in a statement. 

According to the police report, the local fire rescue service responded to the scene and transported one victim to a nearby hospital for non-life-threatening medical treatment.

The police did not name the victims of the shooting or reveal their relationship with Torres, but according to local media, such as WPTV and CBS12, the two people shot dead were her daughter and stepfather.

One of the residents of the apartment buildings, Maria Milensky, told USA Today, “Any time there’s a murder it’s scary, but I think it was just an isolated incident.”

“You could tell. She wasn’t like outside shooting people up or anything.”

Waterleaf Townhomes Apartments, Port St. Lucie, Florida. (Screenshot/Googlemaps)

Filicide

Around one in seven murders belongs to the category known as filicide—the killing of one’s child or children—according to a 2014 study.

That same study found that in the United States there are around 500 such murders every year.

A father killing a son was the most common filicide scenario, followed by a mother killing a son, a mother killing a daughter, and a father killing a daughter.

Lead author Dr. Timothy Mariano, a third-year psychiatry resident in the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, said the three underlying motives appear to be mental illness, high levels of testosterone, and parents, particularly young mothers, feeling they’re unable to provide care for their children.

The authors said neither the statistics nor the hypotheses can definitively explain filicide.

For children under the age of eight, the mother is more likely to be the killer—a trend which reverses at older ages.

Around 7 out of 10 were under the age of six and about one third in total were under one year old.

Around 13 percent of the victims, however, were adults—more specifically those aged 18 to 40 years old.