Neighbors say couple had a rocky relationship leading up to apparent murder-suicide

By Christina Hager

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    OXFORD, Massachusetts (WBZ) — “Those little kids they don’t deserve that,” said Noreen Welch, who never even met the couple who lived, and tragically died, at their home on Old Webster Road in Oxford on Tuesday, in what officials call an apparent murder-suicide. One day later, she stopped by with flowers. “They don’t have a mother now,” she said.

Relatives went through the home, one of them falling to her knees as she gazed at the backyard where investigators say the man who shot and killed himself after he had apparently shot his girlfriend.

“I just wish I had gotten more, kind of a sign from her that it was that serious,” said their neighbor Alex Clemens. “I feel like I could have done something.” He has a security camera on his home across the street, which he says shows the woman’s 13-year-old son jumping out of a front window. He had his 4-year-old sibling, alive, in his arms. “It was very hard to watch,” said Clemens.

He and other neighbors called the teenager a hero. “To actually do the right thing in that situation is hard when you only have a couple seconds, and you know he did the right thing,” said Rich Linehan.

Police dispatchers said they heard gunshots in the background, as they took two separate 911 calls from the same home at the same time. It was the man and woman who were dead on arrival. Police went in and found a third child, a 3-year-old, also alive.

Animal control officers removed the family’s two rottweilers Wednesday. Neighbors say police had been there before, responding to complaints about barking. They say they also heard the couple fighting often and knew there were guns in the home.

“He used to go shooting down by the river in the back of our house, our property,” said neighbor Jeff Emco.

“Kind of just overheard arguments between them. Didn’t think, you know, it would ever come to that,” said Clemens. The District Attorney’s office is holding off on officially identifying the couple. Neighbors say the man was an electrician and the father of the two younger children.

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