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Infant Found Hanging, but Alive in Texas
Three Other Children, Mother Are Dead
By ANGELA K. BROWN
AP
HUDSON OAKS, Texas (May 29) - A relative found the bodies of a 23-year-old woman and her four small daughters hanging in a closet in their mobile home in Texas Tuesday morning, all of them dead but an 8-month-old, who was taken to a hospital, the sheriff said.

Authorities did not immediately release the identities of the victims in the Oak Hills mobile home park, about 25 miles west of Fort Worth.

The woman's sister, who lived nearby, had stopped at the home after the woman failed to show up for work, Parker County Sheriff Larry Fowler said. He said the sister rescued the infant when she realized the baby girl was still alive.

The other children, ages 5, 3 and 2, had all had been hanged with strips of clothing and sashes, Fowler said.

"It's terrible, terrible," he said.

The infant was taken to Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth and was in good condition, Fowler said.

Neighbors in the rural community of 1,600 were stunned. Less than five years earlier, another Hudson Oaks family was torn apart when Dee Etta Perez, 39, shot her three children, ages 4, 9 and 10, before killing herself.

Fowler said the hangings Tuesday also appeared to be murder-suicide, but the investigation was still under way.

The young mother and her girls were last seen alive Monday evening, he said. She was believed to be separated from her husband, who Fowler said has been notified of the deaths.

"I just got a big kick out of watching the kids play over there on her porch, and today it's sad, very sad," said neighbor Joyce Harris.

Texas has seen a disturbing number of child killings by mothers in recent years.

Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the family's Houston bathtub in 2001. In 2003, Deanna Laney beat her two young sons to death with stones in East Texas , and Lisa Ann Diaz drowned her daughters in a Plano bathtub. Dena Schlosser fatally severed her 10-month-old daughter's arms with a kitchen knife in 2004.

All four of those women were found innocent by reason of insanity. Yates initially was convicted of capital murder, but it was overturned on appeal.

Associated Press Writer Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report.
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What is up with the mothers in Texas?

Wow. This is a nightmare. Are there really more incidents of mother murder-suicide in Texas than other states? I wonder if they have a higher population so more cases, or less social services, or more immigrants, or less tolerant attitudes??

Crazy, how some people are infertile and want kids so bad, and others get pregnant before they're ready, and still others kill their kids.

Doesn't seem to make sense.

how heart breaking,i get so sick when i hear news like that

I don't think it has much to do with Texas, there are disturbed people everywhere. Maybe because Texas is such a big state, we have a disproportionate number of incidents like this. Very unfortunate.

Cindy

Extremes always seem to foster the right conditions in which troubled people act out.

I mean extremes of all types, whether that extreme is too conservative, too liberal, too religious or too secular an environment, or too much time alone spent or too much togetherness with troubled other people.

Whether they were stressed or mentally ill, were always ignored or always interfered with too much, may not make any difference to a troubled parent who already has signs of mental trouble.

Sounds like this time (unlike with the other women the article originally referenced), the lady was separated from the husband and that may have been the trigger for her particlar brand of insanity.

Very, very sad.

She was separated from her husband, getting no child support from him, and working at Wendy's while raising four children on her own (albeit, she did have some help from her sister, they worked opposite shifts so they could take care of each other's children). While none of this is even close to an excuse for what she did, I'm sure all the problems she was having, at such a young age herself (24), contributed to it. This was on the news tonight, I live about 50 miles from the town where this happened.

Yes, it is very, very sad.

Cindy

Imagine having to tell that poor baby when it is older what the mother did to her and her sisters. sad indeed. Could possibly be part of post partum depression as well. I went through it with my second child pretty bad but I never thought of killing her.

I don't think it's worse in Texas, only that the article focused there. Two others that pop into my head are the 23 year old mom who threw her three kids into the San Francisco bay, and the infamous Susan Smith of...GA?

The question is how can anyone, much less a mother, be so twisted? I hear about men who murder-suicide their families and am shocked but when a MOM does it, it hits on a much deeper level. No idea why really, it's twisted and wrong either way.

Dez