Family-of-five is shot dead in their home in horrific murder-suicide: Cops were called after a relative received a text from someone inside the house saying they had 'harmed others'

Five members of the same family were found shot-to-death in a gruesome murder-suicide that unfolded inside of their home in Washington state on Sunday. 

The Clark County Sheriff's Office said officers found the bodies inside a home in Orchards, Washington, following a call from another family member who said that they received a text message from a person at the home saying they had harmed people there.

Police used a drone to look inside the home and saw people who appeared to be dead, the station reported. Law enforcement and a paramedic team entered the home at that point where all five were confirmed to be deceased.

The Southwest Washington Regional SWAT team responded due to the threat of a firearm and entered the home with emergency medical personnel, but all five adults inside were dead, KGW8 reported.

Officials have confirmed that there is no further threat to public safety. The victims have not been named. 

Clark County sheriff’s Sgt. Chris Skidmore told the media that all of the victims are adults.  

The sheriff's office said the deaths in the community about 18 miles north of Portland, Oregon, appeared to be a murder-suicide, the station reported.

The Orchards section of Vancouver has a population of around 20,000 people and is statistically one of the safest areas in Washington. 

This tragedy sees Vancouver, Washington, join  more than 30 communities sent reeling by a family mass killing in the last two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty and spares no race or class. 

A family mass killing — where four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator — happened each of the last two years in places as large as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona, a database compiled by USA Today, the Associated Press and Northeastern University shows.

Motives can remain speculative in family killings in which assailants take their own lives, but police often cite financial or relationship issues as the causes. 

Family mass killings are in fact the most common type of mass killing, making up about 45% of the 415 mass shootings since 2006, according to the database. They happen twice as frequently as mass shootings in which members of the public are killed. 

Most, but not all, involve handguns, only about a third involve households with a previous occurrence of domestic violence and most of the assailants have no violent history or criminal past.

There is no governmental agency tracking murder-suicides nationally, so a few years ago policy analysts at the Violence Policy Center — a nonprofit educational organization that conducts research and public education on violence in the U.S. — began tracking details from news accounts to produce an annual report. 

The latest version from 2020 looked at murder-suicides including many mass killings during the first six months of 2019.

The study found 81% of murder-suicides happened at home and 65 percent involved intimate partners. 

The study also found that among murder-suicides where more than three people aside from the assailant were killed, six of the 10 during those six months were incidents in which a person killed their children, partner and themselves.