A neighbor’s Ring doorbell camera showed two women arriving at the home in a residential neighborhood on the east side of Erie, Pa., on Friday evening, screaming and pounding on the door. The sounds of muffled gunshots were heard from inside.
Moments later, the two women were shot dead in the street. Inside, the gunman then shot himself with a .40-caliber handgun.
When police arrived, just before 5 p.m., there was just silence.
“Those officers were met with eerie silence when they arrived there,” Chief Rick Lorah of the City of Erie Police Department said at a Saturday afternoon news conference.
After deploying a drone and a robot, the officers finally entered the home, and found the bodies of seven people, including a 5-year-old boy; a girl who was 1 year and 10 months old; and a woman who was 8 months pregnant. All of the victims inside the home were family members of the suspected shooter, who was only identified as a 45-year-old man, city officials said at the news conference.
In total, nine people were dead, including the shooter. Of the eight people he killed, seven were family members. The other, a family friend, was one of the women found dead on the street.
“It was horrific,” Chief Lorah said. “It was the worst scene I have ever experienced.”
Officers responded to the home within minutes of receiving an alert, city officials said. Emergency responders could not immediately determine if there was an ongoing threat at the scene, but no gunshots were fired after their arrival, officials said. They conducted a tactical response, releasing flash bang devices that some in the neighborhood mistakenly thought were additional gunshots, officials said.
There was no standoff, and all of the deaths occurred before officers arrived at the scene, the officials said, pushing back on rumors that had spread on social media about officers delaying entering the home when they arrived. Multiple generations of the family lived together in the home, and some residents were away on Friday night, officials said. Responding to criticism that the city was slow to release information, Mayor Daria S. Devlin said that part of the reason was that officers needed time to notify other family members of the victims.
Neighbors were rattled and sought answers as they heard gunshots ring out.
Jennifer Lott, who lives on the block where the shooting took place, said she was at home on Friday evening when she heard gunshots. She ran to the street and when she didn’t see anything she returned inside to grab her phone.
Racing back outside, she saw a woman lying in the street.
“I got closer and I noticed she had a gunshot wound to her head and she wasn’t moving and everybody kept telling me to back up, the police were coming,” she recalled in an interview on Saturday.
The identities of the shooter and the victims were not immediately released, and no motive was disclosed. The shooting took place near 7th and Perry Streets, according to a statement from the mayor. The area around the intersection is mainly residential.
Chief Lorah said it was too early to determine an exact motive, but he said that “mental health is at play.” He said that there was a history of the police being called to the residence, but not recently. He said the department’s last interaction with the shooter was in 2022.
The district attorney, Elizabeth Hirz, said that no other people were involved and, therefore, there was no criminal case to bring. But Chief Lorah said the investigation will continue, and will likely focus on the two women who arrived at the scene, and what they knew about what was happening inside the house. He said that investigators would obtain their cellphone records as part of that investigation.
Ms. Lott, 52, said she hadn’t slept all night, and that her neighborhood on Saturday was strewed with crime scene tape, and the road remained blocked to traffic.
She said she knew the identities of two women whom she saw were dead in the street, but was uncertain who else had died. “They wouldn’t give any names,” she said of the police. “They just said nobody made it out of the house.”
She said she knew the gunman and his family, but was not close to them. She described a pattern of domestic turmoil that has gone on for years.
“All I know is they argued a lot,” she said.
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.
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