WALNUT CREEK, California — On 7/21/15 at 0650 hours, WCPD officers responded to a home in the North Homestead neighborhood of Walnut Creek on a report of shots fired. Officers arrived and found two victims deceased from gunshot wounds.
The investigation is still ongoing but all indications are that this was a murder/suicide. There are no outstanding suspects and no threat to the community.
The victim is a nineteen year old female who lived at the residence with her family. The suspect is a twenty one year old male from Lafayette who had a previous dating relationship with the victim.
From KTVU: The Contra Costa County coroner’s office has identified the 19-year-old murder victim as Clare Orton of Walnut Creek, and the man who killed her as 21-year-old Scott Bertics of Lafayette.
Police say the two had previously been in a relationship but couldn’t say how long ago – only that it was not recent.
Police tell KTVU a 911 call came in Tuesday morning from Orton’s parents.
A source tells KTVU Bertics walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Orton answered and Bertics shot her. Then, he shot himself on the front lawn.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call the WCPD at 925-943-5844.
VPC.org: Murder-suicide is “a dramatic, violent event” in which a person, almost always a man, commits one murder or multiple murders, and then shortly after commits suicide.
What makes these acts particularly disturbing is that they involve more than one person and often involve a family. They almost always are committed with a firearm. Yet the phenomenon of murder-suicide garners little public attention as a significant contributor to gun-related death and injury. This is despite the fact that, as one medical professional has observed, “because many murder-suicides result in the death or injury of family members and sometimes mass murder, they cause countless additional morbidity, family trauma, and disruption of communities.”
Currently, no comprehensive national database or tracking system exists to systematically document the toll in death and injury of murder-suicide in the United States.a In order to more fully understand the human costs of murder-suicide, starting in 2002 the Violence Policy Center (VPC) began collecting and analyzing news reports of murder-suicides, resulting in a series of studies titled American Roulette: Murder Suicide in the United States.
For each analysis, the VPC tracked murder-suicide incidents over a six-month period using Internet news reports.
For this most recent edition of the report, news reports of murder-suicides were collected for the period January 1, 2011, through June 30, 2011. To be included in the study, both the murder and subsequent suicide had to occur within 72 hours of each other and within this six-month time period. While there is no official data to ensure all incidents that actually occurred were included, this study provides the most accurate portrait possible of murder-suicide in America and is most likely the largest and most comprehensive analysis currently available.
Photo: ABC 7 News
