Apple Valley 'apparent murder-suicide' involved two adults, one child
The three people found dead in an
Apple Valley home Saturday afternoon included two adults and one child, police said Sunday morning.
Officers
went to a house in the 1000 block of Ramsdell Drive after a neighbor
called about bodies inside. When police arrived, they found three
bodies. A statement from Apple Valley police Sunday morning said those
dead included a child, and that they considered it "an apparent
murder-suicide."
Next-door
neighbor Collin Prochnow, who discovered the bodies and notified police,
said Sunday that the deceased were David Crowley, 29, his wife, Komel,
28, and their 5-year-old daughter.
The bodies were taken to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners office, according to police.
By early
Sunday afternoon, no police tape remained at the scene, a neighborhood
of middle-class homes. The home where the bodies were found was a
half-brick white rambler with a fenced back yard.
Prochnow
said he went to the house on Saturday to gather packages that were
sitting on the front steps. That is when he looked inside and saw the
bodies, he said. A dog was also in the house, he said.
Several
neighbors said they thought Crowley may have been a military or
ex-military member, and that he had close-cropped hair and tattoos. One
neighbor said he thought Crowley worked at home doing screenwriting of
some kind, and that his wife worked as a dietitian.
In a
YouTube video, Crowley is credited as writer and director of a
movie-in-progress, "Gray State." The trailer shows scenes of a
militarized police force, much gun violence and some kind of citizen
insurgency. The trailer solicits online donors to help finance the
project.
The
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Dakota County
Sheriff’s Office are assisting the Apple Valley Police Department with
the investigation.
Police said
they didn’t know how long the bodies had been there, but Prochnow
theorizes it may have been since before Christmas, due to the packages
that had not been taken inside. Prochnow had not seen the family members
since before Christmas, he said, adding that the family had lived there
for about a year-and-a-half.
Alice
Hixson and her husband, Bill, have lived across the street for 21 years.
They said they saw the family in passing and had seen the father and
his daughter playing in the back yard. "It's such a grisly, gruesome
thing," Alice Hixson said.
Maya Rao contributed to this report.