Te Hau Te Horo O'Carroll

Two families were left shocked and confused after an apparently loving father murdered his two children then killed himself on August 2, 2004. The O'Carroll children were curled up under a blanket on the couch watching a video when he came for them. Te Hau was 10, and his sister, Ngamata, almost three. Bronson O'Carroll, their father,​ was clutching a kitchen knife and stabbed each of them in the heart. He then harmed himself, dying while paramedics tried to save him. The children's mother told police and the coroner the relationship was not violent. O'Carroll had been a good father, and there were no signs of any mental health problems. Of her evidence, the only thing noted by the coroner as a "possible indicator" of what would happen were brief tantrums O'Carroll sometimes had when losing computer games. Bronson and the children's mother had separated in January, but were on good terms, he said. She had dropped the children off to stay with their father earlier in the week, with no concerns. In this case, the earliest warning was an alarming call Bronson made at about 5pm on February 2, to his brother who lived 40 kilometres away. "I did it, I did it to the kids," he said. Then he told his brother he was going to kill himself, and hung up. His brother immediately contacted a friend in Otaki Beach, and sent him to the Marine Parade house. When he entered the house the children were already dead and Bronson was seriously wounded. The man who found the family described finding the blinds closed, the floors covered in blood. He came across Bronson O'Carroll first, lying in a blood soaked T-shirt still wielding the knife. The children lay at Pouto Pa in Shannon, then were taken to their mother's Cook Island family in Porirua, where they were buried at Whenua Tapu cemetery. Source: Story by Karoline Tuckey via https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/faces-of-innocents/81390217/faces-...