A Florida woman's financial woes and personal issues drove her over the edge, taking her two teenage children with her.
Jennifer Berman, 48, shot her kids dead before turning the gun on herself in a brutal double-murder suicide in West Palm Beach.
Richard Berman, 51, found the bodies of his children, Alex, 16, and Jacqueline, 15, and their mother dead of a suicide in their home in West Palm Beach on Monday morning just a few hours after he received an email from the distraught mom threatening harm against their two children.
Authorities released the 911 calls from the moment the 51-year-old father and one of their neighbors discovered the three bodies Monday morning.
"It looks like she's laid in bed but she doesn't have a face," the family's shaken neighbor informs the dispatcher of Jennifer Berman. "I think the girl's up in bed with her but when I saw what was upstairs I had to run back downstairs."
Richard Berman called 911 on his way to their West Palm Beach home, telling authorities that he was heading to their house after his "ex-wife said she was going to harm the kids."
"She sent me an email that she did the best thing for our family," Berman told a 911 dispatcher en route to their home. "And then she sent her cousin a text that she was going to kill the kids and herself."
Richard and Jennifer Berman finalized their divorce in December 2013, just a few weeks after Jennifer's mother passed away last fall. Their Pershing Way home, located just off the Lake Worth Lagoon, was in foreclosure and the kids and their mother were given until February to move out.
"Oh, s--t," Richard Berman says in one of the newly released 911 calls, just moments after discovering the body of his dead son in his room. "I was just touching his head. He wasn't waking up. His alarm was on, he wasn't waking up, there's blood in his ear."
The marital and financial problems of the family had existed for years.
Richard Berman originally filed for divorce back in 2008 in an attempt to end the 16-year marriage. The family was living luxuriously for years but early 2013 saw Jennifer Berman struggling to make ends meet without her former husband providing the bulk of financial support.
The mother of two could no longer afford to pay her divorce attorney by April and had been forced to sell her late father's watch just to scrape by.
Their West Palm Beach home was previously owned by Jennifer Berman's mother and had been in foreclosure since 2010.
"The husband has not paid the mortgage on the former marital home during the entire time of the dissolution of marriage proceeding," said Jennifer Berman in official documents filed in court in May 2013. "He has not contributed to the support of the wife or of the minor children. In fact, he has refused to pay for toilet paper, buys food and supplies for himself and keeps them where the wife and children cannot access them."
Previously a realtor, Jennifer Berman was forced to work 12-hour shifts as nurse, as she was left to support their children by herself.
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