Horror and few answers in small Florida town after man kills his daughter and six grandchildren

On Thursday, in the small Florida town of Bell, a man named Don Spirit shot and killed seven people — specifically, his daughter and six grandchildren — before taking his own life, according to police.

No motive was given for the gruesome scene. Authorities said the children who were killed ranged in age from just under 3 months (Alanna Stewart was born on June 28, just 82 days before the shooting) to 11 years (Kaleb Kuhlmann). Sarah Spirit, mother to the six children, was 28.

“We have no indication of what caused this man to do what he did,” Robert D. Schultz III, sheriff of Gilchrist County, said at a news conference. He said there had been no “signs or indications” suggesting that such a thing was possible.

Spirit, 61, had spent three years in prison for shooting and killing his 8-year-old son in a hunting accident, and “they should not have let him out of prison the first time,” a distant cousin told the Orlando Sentinel. He was released from prison in 2006 after serving just under three years, according to the Florida Department of Corrections database.

The shooting took place in Bell, a rural town with about 450 residents that is not near much of anything. It is almost equally far from Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville and Tallahassee, the state capital. The closest place of note is the University of Florida, which is about 40 miles southwest of where the shooting took place. Police on Thursday cordoned off a tree-lined dirt road leading to the house where the shooting occurred, a brutal spasm of violence that erupted in an otherwise quiet area.

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The first sheriff’s deputy who arrived at the home spoke with Spirit before he killed himself, the sheriff’s office said. Police initially declined to say whether a gun was used, but the Gilchrist County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that “multiple victims with apparent gunshot wounds” were found inside the home where this occurred.

While the precise circumstances of this situation — a man allegedly shooting and killing his child and grandchildren in a horrific mass murder — are unusual, murders involving family members killing other family members are not terribly rare. At least 1 in 4 murder victims were killed by family members in 2011, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. (More than half of homicide victims that year were killed by someone they knew.) A fifth of people killed by family members were children, a Justice Department report studying homicide trends between 1980 and 2008 found.

Still, the exact details about what happened in this case were scarce. As Gov. Rick Scott came to the area and as children in Bell went back to schools filled with grief counselors, authorities were still warning that some things could never be fully known about what happened.

“There’s still a lot of unanswered questions that we have,” Schultz said during a news conference. “There’s going to be questions that we’re never going to get answered.”

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