Very insightful comments. There is something that just doesn't hang together here. They are saying it was premeditated but if it was, she did not act like it. She would have had a better plan, one would think. She would have had some story.
The details will surely trickle out. In the meantime, I am going to be praying for everyone concerned. Those poor little kids! You never know what goes on behind closed doors and many families have secrets.
For myself, I have discovered that no family is perfect, but I am just horrified by all the news stories of the past few years outlining truly awful things. I don't remember the volume of horrors when I was younger. Didn't they happen or did they not report them?
If and when she rented the condo on the beach may be part of the pre-meditation?
When we were younger, we saw things through innocent eyes. I personally do not believe they happened to the degree they do now, people were generally more comfortable with their assigned roles in life, and there was doubtless much weeping behind closed doors.
When I was young (50's), I was told about a hush hush story of a relative of a neighbor on the corner of my then idyllic street. She killed a baby in the oven (gas), was institutionalized, got out, and had and killed another one. The people who rented our home after we moved in early 1950's, the mother was mentally ill with children; I don't know how she fared. There was "crazy" Emma with a child and no husband on the corner one street over. I guess the house was filled with filth and nobody wanted anything to do with her. This would be your average, nice, middle-class neighborhood.
I do think things accelerated in the 60's and 70's. My marriage broke up, my pastor tried to patch it up, don't want to get into that, but shortly after the pastor himself was divorced and the associate pastor's wife with two children left him for a jeweler, giving him custody. This was a fairly large Methodist church.
A particularly tragic case occurred sometime in the late 60's. My friend came over one day in shock. One of her husband's work associates came home from church with their older son and found his wife had shot and killed their baby twin girls and turned the gun on herself. She was evidently depressed over her mother having cancer, sounds like there could have been some post-partum depression there with other things I never knew about. This husband had an excellent job with one of the best companies in the country.
A distant family relative shot and killed another woman early last century, have never sent for the court records of that. Her husband moved to another state and eventually committed suicide, if we have made that connection right.
There *were* a lot more suicides in the late 1800's than we might realize, but usually it was men who killed themselves and didn't harm the rest of the family.
I do know that murders in general and other types of crime have accelerated off the charts compared to the local news as I was growing up. Murders were very rare, and armed robberies were uncommon. There was once a stolen vehicle hidden in our alley. That was a real novelty to me as a teenager.
Now it seems things are going downhill faster and faster, like an avalanche.