Police: Mother, 3 kids hanged in mobile home, baby infant still alive*

POSTED: 1718 GMT (0118 HKT), May 29, 2007

Story Highlights
• Investigation ongoing, but murder-suicide suspected, sheriff says
• Hanging child is 8 months old, in good condition, authorities say
• Dead children -- ages 5, 3 and 2 -- hanged with clothes, sheriff says
• Oak Hill mobile home park is located about 25 miles west of Fort Worth

HUDSON OAKS, Texas (AP) -- A relative found the bodies of a 23-year-old
woman and her four small daughters hanging in a closet in their mobile
home Tuesday morning, all of them dead but an 8-month-old, who was taken
to a hospital, the sheriff said.

Authorities didn't 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. (Watch the sheriff describe the horrific scene
inside the mobile home Video)

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. Fewer 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 ongoing.

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.