After what their fellow officers said was a domestic quarrel and murder-suicide, two Detroit police officers who were rumored to be dating were discovered dead.
The two unidentified DPD policemen were discovered on Sunday in a complex of apartments in Livonia, a tiny and typically peaceful community located on the fringes of the considerably more violent Motor City.
According to police, the apartment where the incident took place is located at 6 Mile and Farmington, a reasonably safe section of the mostly residential neighborhood.
The head of the Detroit police department made an appearance outside the structure on Sunday afternoon soon after the corpses were found. He said that they were not naming the policemen but did clarify that they had been romantically engaged.
James White, the chief of the Detroit Police Department, also said that Livonia police will be handling the case of the deceased policemen as other officers looked to be grieving in the background.
Despite not being a part of the current investigation, White would later say that he and other officers in his department who had visited the crime scene, an apartment inside the aforementioned complex, thought the incident was the result of a “domestic dispute” between the two officers as well as a murder-suicide.
The chief underlined that Livonia’s inquiry was still in its early stages and that officers from that department will probably make information in the coming hours to media gathered outside the two-story complex while refusing to identify the pair.
The couple’s specific date of death is unknown, but when local authorities located them, they were both found dead.
Just before 4:30 p.m., soon after the deaths were found, Chief White provided an update to the media, calling the scenario “a really unfortunate circumstance.”
The chief officer in Detroit would then say, “This information is preliminary and susceptible to change.”
“Because we’re all here, I simply want to give you something,” she said.
The chief continued by saying that while his department’s personnel were there, he and his officers were only there because of the circumstances surrounding the case and the victims.
White, who became Detroit’s police chief in 2021 after demonstrations over the passing of George Floyd in neighboring Minneapolis, said, “Clearly we are not initiating an investigation.”
The Livonia Police Department is handling this matter. You’ll hear from them later,’ said White, who would not reveal the identity of the two police officers other than the information that they were married.
White also declined to say which of the two they thought was acting aggressively.
We find the sequence of events to be terribly tragic or sad. White remarked with regards to the identification of the two policemen, “[We] cannot divulge their names at this time; I’m sure you’ll hear that later.”
He said, “We have to respect Livonia’s process of inquiry, but it seems to be domestic – it looks, preliminarily, like a murder-suicide, and that’s where we are right now.” He then lamented the tragedy, calling it a “sad day for the police department.”
White would then express the department’s “thoughts and prayers” for the victims’ family members, using the phrase “family” in the singular rather than plural, which may have been a hint that the two may have been married.
White would then call out the almost 2,500 law enforcement officers under his command, saying they “are taking it fairly hard” in addition to those who knew the victims. Many other police officers from the department were there and seemed to be deep in discussion while the chief talked.
That’s essentially all we have at the moment, White said. Police are still looking into the event.
»Detroit police find two dating policemen dead in an apparent murder-suicide«