Police Looking for a U-Haul Truck Rented by a Maine Mom Find Her and Her Two Daughters Dead in What Seems to Be a Murder-suicide
A mother and her two children were killed and then killed themselves.
Police went to a house in Mechanic Falls, Maine, around 3:30 p.m. on July 27 to look for a U-Haul truck that had been reported stolen because it hadn’t been returned, Mechanic Falls Police Chief Jeffrey Goss said in a news release.
It was at the scene that an officer and a deputy from the Androscoggin Sheriff’s Office tried to get in touch with the owner, who rented the truck, Goss said. As the police looked into it, they found that the resident, an adult woman, had died in her own house. Two kids were already dead when the police went inside.
The tests done by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner showed that the victims were Hope West, 7, Harmony West, 11, and Jennifer Barney, 37. It was decided by authorities that the two girls were killed and that Barney killed himself.
The Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit was given the case and is now in charge of the probe, Goss said.
Goss says that an officer from animal control was called to the house because pets were found there. Animal control will take care of them until “a next-of-kin can be reached and a decision can be made about where the pets should go,” Goss said.
Several people in the neighborhood told WGME-TV that they hadn’t seen the girls in two weeks. The girls usually played outside.
On a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for the kids’ funeral costs, their uncle wrote that Hope’s 7th birthday was July 27, which is also the day police found the body.
Harmony and Hope were best friends, and we’re glad they had each other through the hard times they were going through as kids, wrote Dan Parrott, who was in charge of the event. “The terrible news of their death has broken our hearts.”
The fundraiser said that both girls went to Elm Street School.