By Daniel Trotta
(Reuters) – Five members of a Utah family including children aged 2, 9 and 11 were found dead of gunshot wounds in their home on Tuesday, while one 17-year-old boy was injured, police said.
There were no suspects at large, police said, indicating the shooter was someone within the family.
“We do not believe there’s a suspect on the loose. We believe at this point that this is an incident that’s isolated to this home,” West Valley police spokesperson Roxeanne Vainuku told reporters.
The 17-year-old was in the hospital undergoing treatment and it was too soon to determine whether he was a suspect or a victim, Vainuku said.
The five dead were a man, 42, a woman, 38, a boy, 11, and two girls ages 9 and 2, Vainuku said.
“This is far beyond anything routine,” Vainuku said. “There were four (homicides) in the city for the entire year of 2024 so this more than doubles that number. … This is something that certainly will weigh heavily upon investigators.”
West Valley City is a suburb of Salt Lake City with a population of about 134,000.
Police had been called to the home on Monday by a concerned relative but nobody inside responded and officers looking through the windows found no sign of an emergency or crime, Vainuku said.
When the woman failed to show at work on Tuesday, relatives entered the home and found the 17-year-old wounded in the garage. Officers called to the scene entered the home and found the bodies, police said.
In January 2023, a 42-year-old Utah man whose wife had filed for divorce just before Christmas shot dead seven members of his family including his five children ranging in ages from 4 to 17 and then turned the gun on himself, said officials in the town of Enoch City in southwestern Utah.
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta, Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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