- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
SIX family members of Bangladeshi origin were shot to death in Texas after brothers formed murder-suicide pact, police said.
Farhan Towhid, 19, and Tanvir Towhid, 21, shot their parents, sister and grandmother before killing themselves, reported The Washington Post.
A family friend called police to request a wellness check after Towhid posted a 11-page letter starting with ‘hey everyone. I killed myself and my family’ posted on Instagram.
When the police forced their way into the house in Allen, they found six people dead: Towhid brothers, their father, Towhidul Islam, 54, mother, Iren Islam, 56, grandmother Altafun Nessa, 77, and their twin sister, Farbin Towhid, 19.
According to the police, it is likely the brothers killed their family members on Saturday (3) night.
The mass killing of the family, which moved to the US from Bangladesh about 15 years ago, left friends and neighbors in shock.
The family first settled in New York before moving to Allen, a northern suburb of Dallas. Towhidul worked in information technology while his wife, Iren, took care of the house and their children.
According to reports, the grandmother was visiting from Bangladesh and was scheduled to return home last week, but her flight got postponed because of the pandemic.
Farbin Towhid had recently accepted a full scholarship to attend New York University.
According to Towhid’s note on Instagram, he and his brother Tanvir had struggled with mental illness for years.
Farhan wrote that he had suffered from depression since the ninth grade and had repeatedly harmed himself. His family had tried to help him, but he said that his mental health issues had recently worsened.
He had been studying computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, he wrote, but was expelled from his dorm in the winter after telling a roommate that he planned to kill his family.
He moved home, where Tanvir, whom he described as ‘depressed and socially anxious’, was staying.
Eventually, the pair decided to kill their family and then themselves, he wrote.
The pair bought guns, he wrote, adding that ‘gun control in the US is a joke’ because the pair lied when asked if they were suffering from mental illness.
“We just can’t believe it happened to this family,” family friend Sied Chowdhury, 60, told The Washington Post. “They are a very loving family. We didn’t see anything wrong with the family, any problems.”
Some members of the Bangladeshi community arrived at the scene early on Monday morning and did not leave until the family’s bodies were removed from the home around 6 pm, the report added.
