A 4-year-old girl pretended to be asleep while a suspected gunman shot and killed two people, then made a call to 911 to warn about 3 bodies in a Missouri home before turning the gun on himself, police said.
Police received the cryptic 911 call around midnight on Thursday from Dornubari Dugbor, 31, telling authorities they were going to find three bodies when they arrived at the home in Bellefontaine Neighbors, FOX2 St. Louis reported.
When Officers arrived, they found Dugbor’s fiancée, Katrina Banks, 31, and her teenage son, Kevin Johnson, 15, shot to death.
Dugbor’s body was then discovered on the living room sofa with a cellphone in one hand. He died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police noted.
“It’s a shame. I just would not expect it right here and then being so close to my home,” Miceala Redmond, a neighbor, told FOX2.
Authorities are now investigating the motive for the murder-suicide, but believe that Dugbor had shot Banks and the 15-year-old before he made the 911 call.
Meanwhile, the 4-year-old girl, who is the daughter of Banks and Dugbor, was in the house during the fatal incident.
The girl allegedly heard the entire event play out — from the initial gunshots to the 911 call. At one point the girl walked out to the living room to find her mother dead on the floor, Bellefontaine Neighbors Police Chief Jeremy Ihler said.
Dugbor then told the child to return to the back room, where she remained and pretended to be sleeping.
“Sadly, she’d heard the awful tragedy play out,” Ihler told FOX2. “She was close enough to the event where she heard the gunshots and heard other scuffles and talk during the event and I would imagine a 4-year-old is going to be scared from this type of event. I feel for her greatly.”
Police found the girl unharmed. She was evaluated at a hospital and is expected to be placed in relatives’ care.
Ihler said that the couple got engaged in January.
“We know they had some kind of relationship for the past four years because the 4-year-old was a child in common,” Ihler said.
Dugbor had a house in St. Louis, but was living at Banks’ residence on and off, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Banks reportedly lived at the home with her son since 2014. Police were never called to the home and none of the people killed had a criminal history.