CLEVELAND, Texas -- A mental health official was among those who contacted a Texas sheriff’s office to try to get help sent to a home where four people were later found dead.
San Jacinto County investigators have said 43-year-old Oliver Bills Jr. fatally shot his girlfriend, 27-year-old Shara Torres, her 4-year-old daughter, Sara Whitmire, and his adopted mother, 71-year-old Gloria Bills, before shooting himself on Saturday.
Friends and relatives say Bills was off his medication, hallucinating and growing more violent.
Capt. Carl Jones said Bills just appeared to be an ill man with no history of violence.
Police began receiving non-emergency phone calls about Bills around midday Saturday. Several calls were made back and forth before a squad car was dispatched, Jones said.
"After the first call, officers just knew he was sick. That he wasn’t eating and he needed to go to the doctor. That’s what medics with ambulance services are for," said Jones.
Family friend Mark Campbell said he never saw anyone harmed by Bills, but that the man had acted aggressively and he called deputies around 6 p.m. Saturday.
"This could have been stopped," said Campbell. "If I’d known the deputies weren’t going to get out there any sooner than they did, I would have gone back myself."
The sheriff’s department received a call from an official with the mental health center around 6:30 p.m. Saturday, the Houston Chronicle reported. Burke Center’s spokesman David Cozadd said privacy rules prevented him from discussing patients.
The bodies were discovered around 8 p.m.
Jones has said his office had four squad cars Saturday and was swamped responding a major vehicle wreck, as well as to an unrelated report of a gunman.
broadmindedbroad said on November 10, 2009 at 1:50 PM
Just so sad...four people, including a small child, dead because no "authority figures" were able to put 2 and 2 together and realize this was a volatile and dangerous situation. Nobody had time... so this family ran OUT of time. Forever.
starwynn said on November 10, 2009 at 2:35 PM
Families of the mentally ill have very little options. Everyone assumes it's easy to get authorities to help with someone who is that mentally off - absolutely non-functional. But the patients themselves have so many rights that really it does take ages to get anything done, until there's someone who is literally at the point of killing themselves or the people around them. That happens so quickly that it's often too late. My mom was bi-polar psychotic and we couldn't get her hospitalized without jumping through a milion hoops until finally she was suicidal, driving 100 miles an hour and got stopped by a police man whom she threatened (and luckily he didn't shoot her). Her disease made her not want help, and sadly that's the case with many patients.