Texas Mom Kills Family, Self, Police Say*

Wednesday August 1, 2007 5:16 AM

By JEFF CARLTON

Associated Press Writer

FLOWER MOUND, Texas (AP) - A stay-at-home mother in an affluent Dallas
suburb fatally shot her husband and two children as they slept before
killing herself, police said.

Detectives were reviewing a suicide note left in the house, where Andrea
Roberts killed her husband, Michael Lewis Roberts, and children,
Micayla, 11, and Dylan, 7, police said. Each had a single gunshot wound
to the head.

Their bodies were found in their beds when next-door neighbor Tim Warren
and Michael Roberts' mother checked on the family in the morning at the
request of her son's employer after he missed a business meeting.

Michael and Andrea Roberts, both 41, had attended Micayla's soccer game
the night before, Warren said.

``They seemed like the ideal couple, the ideal mom and dad,'' said
Warren, who has lived next to the Roberts for about seven years. ``Their
kids were their lives.''

Michael Roberts was a caring father who ran his own consulting business,
Warren said. Andrea Roberts often volunteered as a room mother in her
children's classes, said Charlotte Carson, a neighbor.

``She would always volunteer and step up,'' Carson said. ``One of her
biggest flaws was she couldn't say no.''

Officers had responded to a domestic dispute call at the home, about 30
miles northwest of Dallas, in January after the couple had a
disagreement. There were no injuries or arrests, police Lt. Wendell
Mitchell said.

By Tuesday evening, neighbors had left flowers and signs on the front
porch of the red brick home. One sign read, ``We love you Roberts family.''

In Ohio, the deaths of a 44-year-old woman, her 10-year-old son and
7-year-old daughter whose bodies found inside a Delhi Township house
Tuesday were being investigated as homicides, although murder-suicide
was ``certainly a possibility,'' Hamilton County Coroner O'dell Owens said.

The woman's 24-year-old daughter, who doesn't live at the house, found
the bodies, Owens said.