Authorities on Monday investigated what they are calling a “murder-suicide” in an upper-middle class neighborhood in south Bryan County.
Police responded to a phone call about 8:30 a.m. and discovered the bodies of a woman and her son in a home in the Main Street subdivision. Richmond Hill Police Chief Billy Reynolds said the boy was approximately 8 years old. The phone call reporting the incident came from the child’s father, Reynolds said.
Investigators released little information regarding the case by Monday afternoon, including the names of the two or how they died.
“I can’t really say anything more at this time,” Reynolds said. “I doubt we will have anything more before (today).”
Reynolds described the father, mother and child as a “military family.”
The case is being investigated by Richmond Hill police with assistance from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Monday’s murder-suicide was not the first to occur in south Bryan County in recent years.
The bodies of Gail and Jeffery Minor were discovered by Bryan County sheriff’s deputies in May 2010 when they responded to shots fired and discovered them inside a burning house.
Bryan County Sheriff Clyde Smith reported just after the incident that it appeared Jeffery Minor fired two shots into the head of his wife while she was sleeping, went outside and fired 10 shots from an assault rifle through the house next door; went back into his house, ransacked it, set it on fire; returned to the bedroom; fired a shot from the same handgun he had used on his wife into his own head.
Just 15 months later, in August 2011, authorities dispatched to a Richmond Hill residence and found Shirley Davis Hiers, 67, and Richard Earl Bates, 55, with fatal gunshot wounds.
Police said Bates shot Hiers and then turned a 22-caliber rifle on himself.
Monday’s slaying is the third homicide inside the city limits in more than 30 years.
