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