Murder-suicide among older Americans appears to be rising
This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.
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A day after New Year’s, 2025, a 91-year-old man fatally shot his 89-year-old wife in their house in Camarillo, California. He called the police to confess before killing himself. “They were inseparable for the 64 years they were together,” according to the couple’s joint obituary.
Last November in upstate New York, a 69-year-old retiree struggling with his mental health killed his 68-year-old longtime girlfriend and then himself in their home. A neighbor discovered their bodies. “I just don’t know what happened to him,” another neighbor said about the retiree. “He was just a good guy.”
Gun deaths overall have been declining in recent years, but murder-suicides in which at least one of the victims was age 65 or older are higher than ever, according to a Trace analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive. At least 134 older adults were killed in murder-suicides last year, a slight rise over 2024 and the highest number since GVA began compiling data more than a decade ago. Another 85 older adults perpetrated a killing before dying by their own hand.
GVA tracks shootings through media and police reports, so it may not capture every incident. Still, it is one of the most comprehensive sources of data on gun violence in the United States. The Trace took a closer look at the murder-suicides and whether there are points of intervention for people at risk.
What the data shows
There were 679 gun-related murder-suicides in the United States last year. In 144 of them, or 21 percent, at least one victim or perpetrator was 65 or older.
The circumstances behind the murder-suicides of older adults varied. Illness was a motivating factor in at least 15 percent of them. In several cases, the perpetrator was the victim’s full-time caregiver. A couple of shootings followed disputes over inheritance. Two other shooters reported financial struggles before pulling the trigger. A few couples left notes saying the decision to die was mutual, but most shootings appeared to be unilateral actions on the part of the shooter. In many cases, the motive will never be known — not even to the families.
In more than half of the cases we examined, the perpetrator fatally shot their spouse or a current or former romantic partner. In just over a quarter, the perpetrator killed their parent or child, or another immediate family member. Family annihilations, in which someone kills multiple members of their immediate family, accounted for 16 percent of the incidents. Over the past two years, family annihilation has become a twice-daily phenomenon in the United States.
Women made up 80 percent of the victims in last year’s murder-suicides among older adults. The oldest victim was 102. Her 75-year-old son-in-law fatally shot her and her 73-year-old daughter in La Porte, Indiana, in May 2025. A neighbor said the victims had health problems and that the son-in-law had been taking care of them.
All but two of the shooters were men. The oldest perpetrator, a 92-year-old man in Mesa, Arizona, killed his 93-year-old wife and then himself at their senior group home in October.
Several of the incidents involved couples whose bodies were discovered during welfare checks instigated by neighbors or family members, sometimes days or weeks after the killings. In those cases, a motive was difficult to discern — and in a few cases, police couldn’t even tell who the shooter was.
Only a few cases involved a documented history of domestic abuse. In August last year, a 70-year-old man fatally shot his 69-year-old wife and 40-year-old daughter at their mansion in Rolling Hills, California, before killing himself. The couple was in the middle of a divorce. Both victims had a restraining order against the shooter.
Why does this happen?
Experts say the media sometimes depicts murder-suicide among older married couples as mercy killings, in which one or both spouses are ill and choose death over suffering. Police can reinforce this impression. After a 90-year-old man in Yorktown, Virginia, killed his 88-year-old wife and then himself in June 2025, police said they believed he was trying to end her suffering from advanced dementia.
Sonia Salari, a University of Utah gerontologist who has studied murder-suicide across all demographics, said such killings should be treated as domestic violence and femicide rather than romanticized as mutual or compassionate. Evidence of suicide pacts and mercy killings is very rare. In a 2007 study on murder-suicide among older adults, Salari found that “most victims did not consent to the act, and when the danger was known to the victim, some fought back or attempted to flee.” Suicide rates also challenge the notion that murder-suicides are mutual: Women are far less suicidal than men, and while the suicide rate for women peaks between the ages of 55 and 64 and then falls, the suicide rate for men keeps rising with age.
Men generally view old age differently than women. “For women, it’s very liberating to get older, when you have less responsibility,” Salari said. “But for men, it means losses.” Those losses could include a career, physical mobility, or the attention of a spouse who’s become infirm, though sometimes it’s the man who’s ill. One woman Salari interviewed survived a shooting by her husband. Before killing himself, he told his wife, “I’m not going to get over these illnesses with you around.”
The Trace identified more than 20 couples who had been together for two decades or more before they died in a murder-suicide last year. Thirteen of them had been married for more than half a century. One couple had been married for 77 years. Salari has a theory — gleaned from two-plus decades of research — about why men perpetrate a murder-suicide after a long marriage: “They refuse to see the autonomy of their wife to be able to live beyond them,” she said. “They also do not respect her right to decision-making at the end of life.”
Sometimes there are no warning signs, and families are left with only questions. Krista Schenck, 47, lost her parents to murder-suicide in 2021. There had been no history of violence between them, she told The Trace. But her father, 80, who perpetrated the shooting, had begun to display symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
“I’m not sure if he had an episode that morning, or if he was planning it,” she said about the killing. “His phone search history had him looking up cremation, and he was also very insistent about me visiting that weekend. So it does point to being planned. But he’s not here, so who actually knows?”
Her parents bickered as they got older, but never stopped loving each other. “I know that moment doesn’t completely define my dad,” Schenck said. “Bad stuff happens, but it doesn’t erase all the good things. There were so many times he had my back and gave hugs and support when I was growing up. It is rarely cut and dry.”
What explains the increase?
The rise in murder-suicide among older adults may be partly demographic. Boomers, who compose 20 percent of the U.S. population, are between 62 and 80 years old — the age range with the highest suicide risk for men.
Schenck attributes the increase to an aging population, problems accessing health care, and the economy. “People are left to fend for themselves and feel backed into a corner,” she said. “My parents were fine financially, but even then my dad was having panic attacks about mom being taken care of if something happened to him.”
There are also more guns around than in previous years. Americans bought 103 million guns between 2020 and 2025 — a quarter of the estimated 400 million guns in circulation, according to The Trace’s gun sales tracker. While it’s unclear how many of those buyers were 65 and older, Salari, the gerontologist, noted that older adults often inherit firearms from friends and relatives who’ve died.
Catherine Barber, a suicide researcher at Harvard University, said families should consider discussing gun safety with older relatives if they are struggling with domestic violence, health problems, or feelings of hopelessness. Voluntary safe gun storage programs — in which gun owners temporarily hand their firearms over to police, a retailer, or a trusted friend or family member in times of crisis — have been shown to reduce homicides and suicides. The practice, called safeguarding, doesn’t involve the criminal justice system. In addition, at least four states have adopted laws that allow people to temporarily ban themselves from buying guns.
Schenck said physicians should consider gun access when assessing the mental health of older patients, and adults caring for their parents should feel empowered to remove weapons when they pose a danger. “I make it a point to warn people now to pay attention to what is going on with their elderly parents,” Schenck said, “because you never know what is going to happen.”
Reporting and writing by Jennifer Mascia. Graphics by Chip Brownlee.
