In the first two days of June, authorities said, three fathers killed their children and the mothers who raised them. Two used guns. One used a knife. Of the thirteen victims, the youngest was three.
Officials cast the mass killings in Iowa, New York and Florida as “an act of evil,” “the worst of the worst,” and “an unimaginable tragedy,” but Doreen Dodgen-Magee thought of another word: preventable.
For the past three decades, the 60-year-old psychologist has campaigned to prevent domestic violence by telling the story about the day her brother-in-law shot his wife and three daughters. In her view, the country hasn’t done nearly enough to curb what she calls a public health crisis.
Since a pandemic spike, homicides of all kinds have plummeted — except for domestic violence deaths. They have stayed persistently high, The Washington Post found. Attacks in which someone kills four or more relatives have risen this year from a 20-year low, with more incidents in the first half of 2026 than all of last year, according to data from Northeastern University.
Over the past near-decade, FBI figures show, the number of attacks in which more than one family member or intimate partner died peaked at 194 in 2022. The total dropped slightly last year, but it was still well above pre-2020 levels even as homicides overall dropped for four years straight.
From 2017 to 2025, more than 3,000 people died in such bursts of violence. Family and partner killings now account for 21 percent of all homicides, according to the latest numbers, up from 15 percent in 2020.
Dodgen-Magee worries that folks hear statistics like that and instinctively turn away.
“We are at a time of exhaustion,” she said, “but people have to be willing to say, ‘Yeah, that could be me or my sister, so what can we do to change this?’”
Heeding the warning signs is the crucial first step, she said. Her brother-in-law was openly jealous before he started hurting his wife, but members of their church pressed them to stay together.
Laura Whitson got a restraining order and fled with the girls to her mother’s house in a small Oregon town. Dodgen-Magee helped them settle in. There was 5-year-old Sarah (whom she remembers as “joyful, joyful”), 3-year-old Rachel (“a beam of light”) and 6-month-old April (“a chubby love bundle”).
They were packing Sarah’s schoolbag for kindergarten together the evening before David Whitman broke into the house brandishing a gun he’d been able to purchase 48 hours earlier. Only the grandmother survived the bullets. He’d shot the baby in her arms.
The United States has adopted some promising protections since then, Dodgen-Magee said. She cried when President Joe Biden signed in 2022 the first major firearm safety package that Congress had passed in nearly three decades — a measure that expanded criminal background checks and, among other steps, barred those convicted of assaulting a romantic partner from owning a gun.
But she’d like to see more “extreme risk” laws designed to disarm anyone who poses a threat to their family. (Twenty-two states and D.C. have such laws; opponents cite concerns the laws will be used to improperly to deny Second Amendment rights.)
In the overwhelming majority of cases, data shows, family killers are gunmen. Beyond access to deadly weapons, though, more insidious factors amplify the risk, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University.
Often, a toxic sense of entitlement is the fuel. A spouse tries to leave, and her partner lashes out.
“Another way to hurt her,” Fox said, “is to hurt the children.”
Then there are crimes in which someone, usually a man, kills his family out of a twisted sense of honor. Sometimes, he has lost his job, or his status has taken a hit. He sees the children as an extension of himself, Fox said, and delusionally wants to spare them hardship.
Other times, someone just snaps. On Monday, police in Muscatine, Iowa, said a “domestic dispute” triggered Ryan Willis McFarland, 52, to fatally shoot his wife, daughter and four other family members before turning the gun on himself.
That’s why Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, advocates for secure storage laws, which require gun owners to lock away their firearms.
“I have reviewed way too many gun homicide records when a gun gets picked up in a moment of crazy rage,” she said, “and if someone had to think about it for a minute — if we could slow down the impulsive acts — lives could be saved.”
Police haven’t released a motive for Saleh Mohamed, 29, who they say fatally shot his wife and their sons, 3 and 4, on Monday in Upstate New York.
It’s also unclear why Ryan Charles Whiten, a 42-year-old real estate agent, fatally stabbed his ex-wife and their daughters, 11 and 8, before killing himself. Police in Doral, Florida, found the bodies Tuesday.
Irma Denisse Rivera, 52, was cleaning her bedroom this week, television humming, when a presenter announced a special report on that murder-suicide.
She fumbled for the remote, switched off the news and raced to the living room to comfort her 10-year-old granddaughter Phiinyx. The girl was the only survivor of a mass family killing in March 2025, when her mother’s ex-boyfriend, Stephen McKenzie, shot and killed her mother and three siblings and then killed himself.
Ever since, guilt had consumed Phiinyx. Why had they died and not her? Her 11-year-old brother Xion’s nickname was “lion” because he was so protective of his family. The toddler boys, born less than a year apart, were leaning into their distinct personalities: Nova liked to perform karate chops, and Emery danced to commercials.
Luckily, Phiinyx was playing with the family’s two cats when the news report aired this week. “Thank God,” Rivera said to herself. “She didn’t hear.”
News of yet another domestic homicide overwhelms her every time — mostly with sadness for the people left behind. That’s because Rivera knows what’s coming. They, too, will feel haunted by what they could have done differently. Like Phiinyx, she fears, they will struggle with crowds, loud noises and sleeping alone.
The cycle of violence and bloodshed will never stop, Rivera said, until America eases access to mental health care, the kind of treatment that could have helped her daughter’s troubled boyfriend.
“But first thing is,” she said, “no guns in the house.”
Her daughter had planned to leave McKenzie. He shot her and the children before she could go through with it.
Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
correctionAn earlier version of this article misstated the gender of two young boys who were killed in Florida in March 2025.
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