A French father was arrested after police said he killed his entire family, including his wife and four children, on Christmas Day.
Some of the victims were stabbed to death as the bodies lay amid a bloody scene inside an apartment in Meaux, about 25 miles east of Paris, where a concerned neighbor called police after she found blood on the family’s front door handle.
Inside the apartment, police found evidence of “extreme violence” while the 33-year-old father initially went missing before he was arrested Tuesday morning as “the prime suspect,” according to local prosecutor Jean-Baptiste Bladier.
Authorities have yet to announce the formal criminal charges the suspect will face.
The Versailles judicial police service is investigating, but so far authorities have not publicly named the victims nor the suspect — who was known to police after several previous calls to the apartment for incidents involving domestic violence or mental health episodes.
In 2019, the man was accused of attacking his wife with a knife only a month before she was due to give birth to the couple’s third child, according to reports.
Neighbors said the wife recently revealed that her husband was depressed after he lost his job, but that he was undergoing mental health treatment, which helped him to get the charges dismissed in the 2019 case.
The four dead children included two girls, 10 and 7 years old, and two boys, one 4 years old and one 9 months old.
The mother, who was 35, and her two eldest daughters, ages 10 and 7, sustained a massive “number of stab wounds,” Bladier said.
“There were a very large number of stab wounds on both the front and back sides, on the trunk, lower and upper limbs as well as defense cuts,” Bladier said, noting that the two youngest victims had no knife wounds, suggesting they died from drowning or suffocation.
Following Monday’s killings, the father’s cellphone data shows he left the apartment around 8 p.m. local time before going to see his father in nearby Sevran, where he was taken into custody hours later.
Autopsies are scheduled for Wednesday, with authorities hoping to piece together a complete synopsis of what happened. (UPI)