Arizona police have determined that a man deliberately drowned his family by driving “at a high rate of speed” into a lake near Phoenix late Saturday night.
Detectives retrieved “grainy” surveillance footage of Glenn Baxter’s act of murder/suicide this weekend and announced Monday that, despite their initial assessments, “this was not an accident.”
The late-night video they reviewed showed Baxter walking down to the shoreline then returning to his parked SUV, suddenly accelerating it, and sending the out-of-control vehicle into Tempe Town Lake.
It struck a small embankment first then rolled over midair before plunging upside down into the lake, drowning the 27-year-old driver, his young wife, and their three toddler children.
A police spokesman said that a firearm was retrieved alongside the bodies of the dead, indicating that the doomed family’s midnight date with death was likely orchestrated at gunpoint.
Those findings confirm doubts already conveyed by relatives of Baxter’s victims, who told investigators that devoted mom Danica Baxter would “never, never” have willing taken her kids for a ride with her estranged husband at that hour.
The couple had been irreconcilably separated due to the suspect’s “anger management” issues, they said.
Eponymous Rox
parricide, mass murder, Phoenix, Arizona
