NY girl, 12, wakes to find three generations of her family dead

In the predawn darkness, Christina Walker, 12, lifted herself off her blood-soaked bedroom floor and went to the phone. Three generations of her family — her 7-year-old sister, her mother and her grandmother — lay nearby, fatally shot in the head by her father, the authorities said.
Christina, 12, had been shot in the head, too. A bullet had exited near her eye. Her speech was muddled, her words a bit difficult to make out, according to Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives for the New York Police Department. But the girl pressed on, dialling 911 and even trudging downstairs to pull the door open for police officers.
In a storm of violence in Queens early Saturday, Jonathon Walker killed his younger daughter, Kayla, along with the girls’ mother, Shantai Hale, 31, and Hale’s mother, Viola Warren, 62, the authorities said. Walker, 34, then drove to a desolate area 6 miles away, where he fatally shot himself.
Christina, the only survivor, was taken to Long Island Jewish Medical Centre, where she was in critical but stable condition, the police said. The shooting started shortly after Walker returned home at 5.38am. He moved between the upstairs bedrooms and shot each of the four victims with a .45-calibre gun, the police said.
A nightclub bouncer and security guard, Walker then drove his silver GMC Acadia from the two-family home in the Brookville neighbourhood near Kennedy Airport, where all five lived, to a remote area on Lefferts Boulevard, just south of the Belt Parkway, the police said. Inside the vehicle, he shot himself in the head, the police said.
Boyce said at a briefing that Walker had called his brother in Las Vegas after the shooting and told him: “What I did, I cannot come back from.”
The killings turned a quiet dead-end block into a scene of despair on a grey Saturday morning, as relatives stepped through a layer of slush and ducked under caution tape.
They sobbed into the arms of Wendell Warren, 53, whose oldest sister was Viola Warren. “We will be baffled for years to come,” he said softly.
Joseph Simmons, 34, said Hale, his cousin, had recently grown despondent about her relationship with Walker, a former professional basketball player in Europe who stood 6 ½ feet tall.
Hale had dropped out of high school after getting pregnant with Christina, he said, and lived with Walker for years without marrying.
But recently she realised the relationship was crumbling, and she started to post spiritual sentiments on social media, Simmons said. “He’s just not what he appeared to be,” Simmons said of Walker.
Glen Roy Hibbert, 49, who lives two houses from the Walker family, said he did not understand the violence. He recalled often seeing Walker outside with his daughters, and sometimes waving to him. Hibbert even invited him to a barbecue.