3 in Seal Beach Family Found Dead in Home

Three bodies, apparently all family members, were found in a house on Hazelnut Avenue Tuesday night, possibly the victims of a murder-suicide, police said.

Police received a call at 9:47 p.m. and arrived at the house in the 4800 block of Hazelnut to find two bodies in the living room and one upstairs. The bodies were two females and one male.

The son of the dead couple apparently survived the attack.

A woman who lives across the street, Tammy Brockman, 20, said the family has “stayed to themselves most of the time. It’s always quiet here. We’ve never had anything this big.” She estimated the family had lived there 10 to 15 years.

The house is located in the northern section of the city known as College Park East, a middle-class neighborhood sandwiched between the 5,000-acre Naval Weapons Station and the 1,300-acre Los Alamitos Armed Forces Reserve Center.

Seal Beach, a community unaccustomed to violent crime, was rocked earlier this year when two reputed gang members from Long Beach shot a gas station attendant to death. The two teen-agers were convicted in October.

Prior to that, the last murder in Seal Beach occurred on New Year’s Eve, 1994, during a robbery.

“That statistic should tell you that it doesn’t happen very often around here,” said police dispatcher Josh Goldmark.