A family, including two sons, were found dead in their Pennsylvania home basement two weeks after the father bought a gun.
Pennsylvania married couple and two sons shot to death
Over the weekend, a family was found dead in their southeastern Pennsylvania home in an apparent murder-suicide after the husband purchased a gun. On Sunday, 12:30 PM, the Chester County police responded in West Whiteland Township home after New Jersey relatives reported the family being unable to contact in several days.
According to Daily Mail, officers who responded to the 100 block of Mountain View Drive where the family resides, he entered the residence through the garage and discovered bodies of a man, woman, and two boys in the basement, Detective Scott Pezick said. The Chester County coroner's office identified the bodies as Arti Madhusudan Adya, 47; Deepak Prabakhar Kulkarni, 50; Shubham Deepak Kulkarni, 14; and Sharvil Deepak Kulkarni, 7; all were residents of West Whiteland Township.
The family sustained gunshot wounds. However, the final determination of the manner and cause of death will be based on pending autopsies as well as further investigation, said the coroner's office.
Coroner Christina VandePol said that the tragedy annihilated a family, expressing sympathy to neighbors and relatives. For two years, the family resided in the Mountain View Drive, but they had lived in the township before that, Pezick explained.
In a statement, the township police said the initial investigation and evidence indicate that the incident resulted from a murder-suicide and there were no threats to the community at large. However, the police have not officially identified the gunman in the murder-suicide.
The Pennsylvania family's dad bought a gun before the incident
The law enforcement sources told The Philadelphia Inquirer that Kulkarni, the software analyst dad, had bought a gun two weeks before the murder-suicide incident. The relatives and other people close to the Pennsylvania family said they had noticed a change to Kulkarni, saying he seemed distant lately. Kulkarni was seen taking daily walks as a break to the monotony of the COVID-19 quarantine, the family's neighbor told the Inquirer.
The neighbor said she saw Kulkarni a few days before the tragic incident, which usually Kulkarni was friendly and talkative but became 'not his usual self,' 6abc reported. The couple met in India and had been married for 18 years. To pursue careers in tech, the family moved to the U.S.
The Pennsylvania father was a software analyst
Kulkarni worked for more than ten years as a software analyst at Education Management Systems, as per his LinkedIn profile. Meanwhile, the mom was employed at the University of Pennsylvania as an application developer. The Pennsylvania couple's sons studied in Collegium Charter School, a public school in Exton.
In the months leading up to the killings, Kulkarni canceled planned family events without providing any explanation, Anand Adya, Arti's brother, told the Inquirer. "It was obvious she wanted to meet, but he didn't let us," Anand said.
Arti's brother also revealed that Kulkarni, friendly but secretive, asked him for a loan in December. Whenever Adya asks her sister if anything was wrong, she would say there is none, he said.
Adya was worried for his sister and family when he could not reach his sister in more than a week. Then he drove to their rental home to check on them. When he knocked on the door and got no response, he decided to call the police, which led to the Pennsylvania family's tragic discovery.
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