In early January, a man in Clay County, Miss., gunned down six people, including his father, a brother, an uncle and a 7-year-old second cousin, officials say.
A shooter walked into a hockey rink in Pawtucket, R.I., in February and killed an ex-wife and an adult son and wounded three others, including the ex-wife’s parents, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
And in Shreveport, La., a father killed eight children on Sunday, including seven of his own, and wounded their two mothers before killing himself, according to the authorities. Henry L. Whitehorn, the sheriff in Caddo Parish, La., described the killings as “the most heartbreaking tragedies that we have ever witnessed.”
Domestic violence occurs with disturbing regularity in America. One horrific subset of such violence is the slaying or attempted slaying of multiple relatives and sometimes one’s entire family, an act so coldblooded that it can seem unthinkable. It is not common, but it happens enough that experts have a name for it: family annihilation.
To many of those experts, the definition of the term, also called familicide, involves the attempted killing of multiple relatives. Some family killings fall outside of that specific criteria but are no less shocking.
There is no publicly available comprehensive data on family annihilations. Gun violence prevention organizations, like the nonprofit Violence Policy Center, often rely on news reports to populate their databases, and some databases account for these killings in broader categories, such as murder-suicides or mass shootings.
Law enforcement agencies do not always keep or track data on the family relationships among the killer and victims, and many domestic crimes involve fewer individuals, do not involve a suicide, or were not carried out with a firearm.
But some statistics offer at least a rough picture of the prevalence of this kind of violence. Analyzing news reports from the first half of 2025, the Violence Policy Center estimated that there were 22 family annihilations last year, in which three or more family members were killed, followed by a suicide.
A vast majority of the perpetrators in family annihilations are men, and most crimes of this kind involve a gun. But among the notable exceptions is Andrea Pia Yates, a mentally ill mother in Texas who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001 and did not kill herself.
Researchers say that many family annihilators have some psychological factors in common. These include having suicidal thoughts and experiencing the breakdown of an intimate relationship.
Some men are also motivated to act because of depression related to losing a job or other financial problems, and believe that the family is better off dead than remaining alive to deal with such issues.
Others act out of jealousy, or feelings of humiliation from losing their children, or because they view their families as property. Such people can consider their family to be something they are “solely responsible for,” said Melina Milazzo, the director of public policy at the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
“There is this sort of belief system that if I can’t have you, no one can, and that extends past the individual partner,” Ms. Milazzo said. “It can extend into the family. It goes back into all power and control — the belief system that they own the individual or family unit.”
Expressing suicidal thoughts or threats of violence are red flags, experts say. But there are some cases where there is no history of violence, said Neil Websdale, a criminology professor at Northern Arizona University. Those are primarily tied to threats to men’s identities “as providers and husbands and parents,” he said.
“It destabilizes their identity,” he said. “Their shame is so clear and acute that it results in violence.”
The most dangerous time for a person “in any kind of domestic violence situation,” Ms. Milazzo added, is at the end of a relationship.
In the Shreveport, La., killings, the woman who had raised the gunman said he had been facing the possibility of his marriage breaking up, and that he had become distraught about the prospect of losing his family.
Domestic abusers may also have a history of trauma, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or previous exposure to violence in their childhoods, said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing. She added that some studies also showed that they may also have brain damage from head injuries.
“If anybody talks about killing themselves or others,” she said, “we need to take that seriously.”
More needs to be done to address this violence, Ms. Milazzo said. Recent cases have made headlines and attracted the public’s attention, she added, but there are many that aren’t reported on.
“This is a systemic issue that requires a systemic response,” she said.
Eduardo Medina contributed reporting.
Christina Morales is a national reporter for The Times.
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