El Paso police are currently investigating the deaths of two people in an apparent grisly murder-suicide. Police report that neighbors said that they heard gunshots in the early morning hours on Thursday, according to ABC-7 .
The El Paso Times reported that detectives with the Crimes Against Persons Unit and the crime scene investigators have locked down the block with a police mobile command vehicle on scene. El Paso investigators had been at the location for hours processing the deaths of the couple.
Sergeant Chris Mears of the El Paso Police Department said that officers were the ones who found both people dead.
“We found a female in her 60s dead at the scene and also her estranged husband a male in his 70s also dead from an apparent suicide.”
El Paso police officers were called to respond to a domestic disturbance that was in progress early Thursday morning at the home of Elva and Victor Melendez.
El Paso police found the body of Elva Melendez, 63. She was found dead in her kitchen. She had been stabbed in the chest.
El Paso police also found the body of Victor Melendez, 72, dead in his backyard. El Paso police believe that Melendez had been the one who stabbed his wife in the chest, killing her. He had sustained a self-inflected gunshot wound to the head, in an apparent suicide.
Neighbor to the El Paso couple, Alex Montelongo, said that he could hear the gunshots from his residence, which was only four houses down.
Montelongo talked about his neighbors.
“I mean I’ve lived here more than 30 years and have a lot of the same neighbors, we feel real safe. There’s a lot of traffic here you know, but other than that the neighbors are really good people, real stable neighbors,”
Investigators have been at the house of the Melendezes, processing the crime scene for hours.
Mears explained the process at the crime scene.
“We have to process the scene and make sure that the physical evidence and everything confirms that its a murder-suicide. We don’t have any reason to doubt that, but we have to make sure. Two people are dead and we have to make sure that we know what happened,”
This case marks the second murder-suicide in El Paso in the past week. It also marks another murder-suicide case in Texas in the past year, as reported by the Inquisitr .
[Photo Credit: Brandon Anderson / Flickr]
