Neighbors Describe Finding Couple's Children After Double Homicide

Police are continuing to investigate with their three children nearby.

At about 4:20 a.m. in the 300 block of North Seventh Street near Japantown, shouting could be heard coming from the home where the couple, identified by neighbors as Pedro and Marybel Jimenez, lived with their three children.

Awakened by the noise, neighbors Renee Zarate and Ringo Martinez peered out their front window toward the house across the street and heard gunshots, Zarate said.

After the first shots were fired, Zarate said she heard a woman screaming. She then heard another gunshot and the woman's screaming stopped.

A few moments later, Zarate said she saw a man in a black hooded sweatshirt leave the house.

"We opened the door and we see the guy running like a bat out of hell," she said.

The man stopped briefly at the street corner, she said.

Scared that the gunman would come back for the couple's children, who Martinez said are 8, 5, and 3 years old, Zarate ventured across the street, where the couple's oldest child, a boy, stood on the steps near a broken front window.

"I just got the little boy ... I asked him if he was OK and he just said, 'He shot my mom and daddy,'" Zarate said. "The girl was already walking down the stairs ... the other little boy wouldn't come out. He was standing in the kitchen."

She said she was eventually able to coax him out of the house.

"He was barefoot and there was glass all over ... he was shaking, he was just like, traumatized."

Martinez said he had been to the police station for questioning later that day, where he had seen the children playing "like nothing," but that the little girl had begun to ask questions about her parents.

Zarate said the children have been taken in by their grandmother. She said she believes the shooter may have been the boyfriend of Marybel, who had recently reunited with Pedro, the father of the three children, after a separation.

Police said this morning they are not yet releasing additional details about the case.

Follow us on Twitter | Like us on Facebook | Get our daily newsletter| Blog for us

—Bay City News