A husband and wife are dead at a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall in Thorton, Colorado, in what local police are investigating as a homicide.
The Thornton Police Department posted a news release to Twitter stating that an adult male shot and killed his wife before dying by suicide. “On a day that’s historically associated with joy, family and fun, we’re saddened to inform you of the following,” the news release read. According to the post, the couple were former members of the Kingdom Hall congregation—no services were taking place at the time of the shooting.
Earlier, the department tweeted that there is no active threat currently, though a “suspicious device” was found and is being evaluated by the Hazardous Materials Unit.
Witnesses told FOX31 Denver that a person had fired a gun in the parking lot at a member of the Jehovah’s Witness congregation and tried to throw an item “similar in appearance to a pipe bomb” into the building on Christmas morning. A man who lives across the street from the place of worship told The Denver Post that he heard two gunshots and looked outside to see a woman lying on the ground.
Michael Abeyta, a CBS News Colorado reporter, tweeted that one of the Kingdom Hall’s windows was broken; that there was a dead body in the parking lot; and that a “[b]omb robot” had been deployed on the scene.
