Father fatally shoots daughter, son, himself in Miami Lakes. The children’s mother found them
A father shot and killed his own children on a canal bank in Miami Lakes late Tuesday, before turning the gun on himself, police said.
The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office has identified the father as Humberto Tovar, 41. The two children are Baleria Tovar, 12, and Matias Tovar, 9.
According to Miami-Dade police, Tovar picked up the two children from their mother’s home. The mother became worried some time later when she wasn’t able to contact them because they had school early the next day.
Desperate, the children’s mother, who hasn’t been named, found the bodies after 9 p.m., not far from her home in the 6400 block of Miami Lakes Drive. Tovar and his two children were found on the grass next to a concrete bench on a section of the lake facing Miami Lakes Drive. The community is a mixture of townhouse developments and commercial property.
A neighbor in the townhouse complex next to where the bodies were found told local media she heard screams and ran outside and saw the mother of the two children trying to revive one of them.
“I started looking and I saw the man’s body there and I saw the little girl’s body there, and the mom was trying to do compressions on the little girl. She even pulled her body towards the son’s body to bring them closer and she herself started doing chest compressions on them,” neighbor Magda Peña told WTVJ Channel 6. “At that point I was crying already. I think I went into shock cause I was just like freaked out.”
Miami-Dade Police Director Alfredo Ramirez III, in a tweet, said the father “senselessly” killed his children. “My deepest condolences to the family of the victims,” he wrote.
Little was known about Tovar and the family on Wednesday.
Apart from a few traffic tickets, Tovar had only one minor brush with the law — a 2001 arrest on a municipal violation for possession of drug paraphernalia. The charge was dropped. Court records show no documented history of domestic violence.
It wasn’t immediately clear where the children were enrolled. A school spokeswoman said the two children did not attend public school in Miami-Dade.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more is learned.
This story was originally published February 8, 2022 at 10:58 PM.
