Family Slayings Sadly Familiar to Ventura County

Ventura County has not been immune to the kind of violence that happened Monday night inside the Caro family home in the Santa Rosa Valley.

In fact, the last decade has seen two mass killings of families and at least two murder-suicides involving parents and children.

“It’s the ultimate penalty on the people who are left behind. You not only kill yourself, you take whoever they love most with you,” said Dr. Astrid Heger.

Heger, a pediatrician and executive director of the Violence Intervention Program based at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, said most family killings in which a parent murders the children and then commits suicide are the result of severe problems between the spouses.

“It’s usually the ultimate revenge or ultimate statement to the other parent,” she said.

It is unclear if this was the case in the Caro family, and a variety of factors played into the county’s other similar killings.

In one of the bloodiest shootings in county history, a Simi Valley man shot his wife and their three young sons before turning his hunting rifle on himself May 27, 1997.

Ahmad Salman, 44, was depressed and debt-ridden when he killed his family in the backyard of their middle-class tract home near the Arroyo Simi.

Salman, a quality-control technician at a Camarillo communications equipment factory, was found curled up with a rifle by his side near his twin 5-year-olds, Zain and Zaid.

Salman’s wife, Nabela, 38, and 3-year-old son Yezen, were found on the other side of a fence they had climbed trying to escape.

At the time, Salman had been on medical leave from his job and was thousands of dollars in debt with credit cards, neighbors and friends said.

He was also suffering clinical depression and had been hospitalized at least once. Neighbors said Salman frequently talked of being financially stressed and not knowing what to do about it.

The couple apparently had a rough marriage and often argued loudly enough for neighbors to hear.

“The sad thing is, he was crying out for help, but nobody knew what to tell him. I believe he was a good man, but couldn’t take the pressure,” Jan Ferris, a woman who once rented a condominium from Salman, said in 1997.

Two years before the tragedy at the Salman home, Simi Valley resident Larry Sasse, estranged from his wife and in a drug-fueled fury, shot his two young children before killing himself.

It was the night of Father’s Day on June 18, 1995, when Sasse, 31, a refinery worker in Wilmington, took his kids, Breanna, 4, and Michael, 3, into the garage of his home and fired one bullet each into their heads before shooting himself.

Before the killings, Sasse opened the garage door leading to the street, apparently so his wife, Debra Forrester, could see the carnage, according to Sasse’s roommates.

Forrester raced to the scene after hearing about the shootings and saw her children and husband dead. It was an image that haunted her, manifesting in nightmares, insomnia and anxiety, she told The Times five months after the killings.

In June 1991 at two homes in Simi Valley, there were separate murder-suicides involving parents and their children.

On June 19, 1991, Karen Marie Christensen, 45, shot and killed her 15-year-old daughter, Emily, as the girl prepared for her graduation from Sinaloa Junior High School, and then turned the gun on herself.

A motive was not immediately apparent, but authorities said Christensen had a history of problems, including a divorce, two suicide attempts and a conviction for purposely setting her house on fire.

Eight days later, Simi Valley resident William Boehmer, 57, shot his 11-year-old son, Sean, as the boy lay sleeping in an upstairs bedroom of Boehmer’s apartment. Boehmer then turned the gun on himself.

Authorities said Boehmer, who had been operating a video business out of his apartment and was recently divorced from the boy’s mother, had been upset over financial and health problems.

Evidence also was found indicating he had been planning the deaths for some time.

“There’s almost always a sense of profound anger,” said Heger of the Violence Intervention Program. “And it is much more common that the male, not the female, does the killing. This is someone who is extremely, extremely angry.

“It’s the ultimate form of suicide. If I’m going to die, I want you to really care,” Heger said.