Mass Murders

Covina Police Chief Kim Raney was relaxing at home with his family around midnight on Christmas Eve. Lt. Tim Doonan was making late-night preparations for the holiday morning. And Det. Dan Regan was in bed, just starting to doze off. Then their phones started ringing. "Units are responding to a shooting in progress," the caller said.

Washington state investigators say five children 7 to 16 years old have been found dead in a Graham-area home and they may have been killed by their father. Pierce County sheriff's investigators told the News Tribune that the children apparently were homicide victims. Spokesman Ed Troyer said the father, 35, was discovered dead Saturday afternoon in neighboring King County. Deputies were called to check on the welfare of the children at a mobile home park after the father's body was found.

An armed man strolled to the back of an exercise class at a health club in suburban Pittsburgh on Tuesday night, pulled out two guns and started shooting, leaving at least four people dead, including himself, and wounding at least 10 others. "He did not say anything," Allegheny County Police Supt. Charles Moffatt said. "He walked right into the room where the shootings occurred as if he knew exactly where he was going."

Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton wrote a goodbye note Thursday, one sentence on a single piece of paper: "The truth will win in the end." He laid it on his bed. Then he climbed into the aging ambulance he liked to drive and set out for City Hall. Within minutes, Thornton would kill five Kirkwood officials and injure two others, including the mayor, in an attack that shattered this quiet suburb. Police and witnesses said that shortly before 7 p.m.

A man concealing an assault rifle and handgun in a box slipped into a cherished Jewish seminary here and opened fire in the library Thursday night, killing eight people in the deadliest attack in Israel in nearly two years. Witnesses said the assault lasted more than 10 minutes before a seminary student and an off-duty army officer killed the gunman, identified by police as a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem.

A sea of people clad in maroon and orange, some with heads tearfully bowed, others with arms interlocked, paid tribute Wednesday at Virginia Tech to the victims who died a year ago in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The accomplishments of each of the 32 people echoed across the Drillfield, a litany of what they had done and planned to do before a student gunman killed them in classrooms and a dormitory. Austin Cloyd had an iron will. Caitlin Hammaren loved playing the violin.

Five people found dead over the weekend in an upscale San Clemente home were identified as a husband and wife, their twin daughters and the woman's mother -- none of whom had been seen in at least two weeks, a sheriff's official said Tuesday. Although at least two of the family members suffered gunshot wounds, the investigation has not revealed how the family died.

"I'm going to kill people in Akihabara. I'm going to crash into a crowd of people and when the car is down I'll use a knife. Goodbye everyone." -- Text message believed to have been posted on the Web by Tomohiro Kato at 5:21 a.m. the day seven people were slain in Tokyo's Akihabara district.

Leonor Merino said she was shocked enough Monday to find that what she thought was a pile of rags was a dozen bodies. Then she realized children soon would be passing by the carnage on the way to school. So as class time approached at Valentin Gomez Farias elementary school, Merino and her neighbors blocked the streets. "We closed the streets so the kids wouldn't see all the dead bodies," Merino said hours after the bodies were removed. "Our hearts are trembling right now.

Mexican authorities Thursday said they had arrested two suspects in the slayings of 24 men whose bodies were discovered in a wooded area outside Mexico City last month. Federal prosecutors said one of the suspects is a municipal police commander in the state of Mexico, which surrounds the capital on three sides. The other, identified as having led the planning for the killings, runs a security company in the same state, officials said.