Four dead in two domestic murder-suicides in North

Both husbands had history of spousal violence; additional death in Ashdod after man found with deep stab wounds.

By MELANIE LIDMAN
crime scene (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski [illustrative])
crime scene
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski [illustrative])
Four people were killed in two domestic murder-suicide episodes in the North on Sunday.
In Kiryat Ata near Haifa, a 45-year-old man stabbed his wife to death and then hanged himself. In Masad in the Lower Galilee, a 58-yearold man shot his wife to death and then shot himself.
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Police arrived at the house of the couple in Kiryat Ata’s Bayit Vagan neighborhood on Sunday morning to discover the body of a man hanging in the front yard. When they entered the home, they found his wife’s body inside; she had been stabbed to death, police said.
She had reportedly filed two domestic violence complaints against her husband, and in May 2010 he was detained for questioning on suspicion of assault. The husband denied the allegations and the case was closed for lack of evidence.
Neighbors said that the situation at the home deteriorated after the woman asked for a divorce, and that the husband sometimes locked his wife and children inside. Police have not released the names of the woman or her husband.
“The writing was on the wall,” neighbor Galya Prahi told the Hebrew media. “We always heard yelling coming from the house. There were loud arguments, and one of the neighbors even complained to the police,” she said.
The couple had three children, aged 16, eight and seven. All of them were in school during the incident. The woman was a teacher at her children’s school, neighbors said. The children are being looked after by the local social services department and their grandmother.
On Sunday evening in Masad, a small communal settlement northwest of Tiberias, there was apparently a second murder-suicide, of a couple in their 60s. Police discovered the bodies after responding to a call that shots were heard in the house.
The man was arrested in 2008 for attacking his wife and served a number of months in prison, according to Galilee Police spokesman Eran Shaked. He was eventually released on condition that he wear an electronic anklet to ensure that he stayed away from Masad, and went to live with his sister in Modi’in.
At the end of 2010, the man completed the two-year period of electronic restriction, and went back to live near Masad.
Shaked told The Jerusalem Post the man was in constant contact with a social worker, as prescribed by the courts, and he had made no attempts to get in touch with his wife or to approach his former home. No complaints had been filed against him in the three months since he had moved back to the North.
On Sunday, the man allegedly walked into the house and shot his ex-wife. Their youngest child, a 17-year-old boy, was home at the time and fled the scene. The couple has three older children who no longer lived at home.
In a separate incident on Sunday, a 45- year-old man who appeared to be homeless was discovered with deep stab wounds all over his body in an Ashdod park. Pedestrians passing through the park on Rehov Yoseftal alerted emergency services around 2:20 p.m. when they saw him lying on the ground.
Magen David Adom tried to save him, but the man died on the way to Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot.
Police quickly located two suspects and took them in for questioning, and were trying to determine the victim’s identity.