A Polk County, Florida mom killed both of her children and herself after losing a custody battle with her ex-husband, Orlando’s New 6 reported.
In a press conference last weekend, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said that based on the investigation, Brandy Hutchins shot and killed her 19-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son before shooting herself rather than surrendering her son to his father.
According to the Sheriff, Hutchins’s ex-husband arrived in Florida last Thursday to appear in court after Hutchins failed to turn their son over to his father, who resides in Maine. At the hearing, the judge ordered Hutchins to surrender the boy by 6 p.m.
When she failed to show up at the appointed time, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office was notified that Hutchins violated the court order and deputies spent the weekend searching for the boy.
Then on Sunday, deputies received a call notifying them that the boy was at Brandy Hutchins’ mobile home in Lake Wales where she lived with her 19-year-old daughter from another father.
Deputies arrived at the mobile home Sunday afternoon and found 10-year-old Aiden Hutchins dead, along with his half-sister and mother.
According to Sheriff Judd, Brandy Hutchins had murdered her two children before turning the gun on herself. He said Hutchins had no criminal history or history of mental illness, and there was nothing to indicate that there would be any violence.
He told reporters that in the hundreds of thousands of court orders his office deals with, they have rarely seen such violence, all because the mother refused to turn over her son to his father.
According to the FBI, as many as 600 murder-suicides occur each year, accounting for as many as 1,000 deaths. Approximately 65 percent involve intimate partners and 81 percent occur in the home, the Miami Herald reported.
