Mother fatally shoots 3-year-old daughter, herself in West Philly murder-suicide, police say
The woman was pronounced dead at the scene, while the child was taken to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and pronounced dead shortly after, police said.
A West Philadelphia woman shot and killed her 3-year-old daughter, then turned the gun on herself Sunday night in an apparent murder-suicide, police said.
Police responded to a shooting at an apartment on the 3900 block of Lankenau Avenue, in the River Park section of the city, shortly after 6 p.m. and found the woman and child with gunshot wounds, police said.
The woman, a 45-year-old whom police did not identify, was pronounced dead at the scene, according to police. The girl was taken to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she was pronounced dead shortly afterward.
Police are investigating the shooting as a murder-suicide, said department spokesperson Sgt. Eric Gripp, and are awaiting a report from the medical examiner’s office. The woman and her daughter lived in the apartment, he said.
The tree-lined block of mostly brick houses on Lankenau Avenue was quiet hours after the shooting, with only the scraping sounds of a neighbor working on a home’s front steps and the rustling of leaves breaking the silence of a windy afternoon.
A man who answered the door at the apartment Monday afternoon said he was the woman’s boyfriend but declined to comment on the shooting.
On Sunday, neighbors said they had seen the woman playing outside with her daughter earlier in the day, prosecutors said, and later told investigators they heard multiple gunshots.
The sequence of events in the fatal shooting is still being investigated, said Assistant District Attorney Jeffrey Hojnowski of the office’s Homicides and Non-Fatal Shootings Unit.
While police say they believe the woman intentionally shot the child and then took her own life, Hojnowski said it was possible that the girl might have accidentally shot herself after picking up an unattended gun and that her mother, racked with guilt, then turned the gun on herself.
Police continue to investigate.