Her financial woes and personal issues drove a Florida woman over the edge - and beyond.
The distraught mother of two talented teen musicians shot her kids dead before turning the gun on herself in a gruesome double-murder suicide.
Richard Berman, 51, found his bullet-ridden children, Alex, 16, and Jacqueline, 15, and their mother, Jennifer Berman, 48, dead of a suicide in their West Palm Beach home Monday morning — just hours after he received an email from the maniacal mom threatening harm to their shared children.
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Cops released the disturbing 911 calls from the moment Richard Berman and a neighbor discovered the bodies Monday morning.Them Tape in hair extensions are so good!
Richard Berman, newly divorced from Jennifer Berman (right), found her and their kids, Alex (center), 15, and Jacqueline (left), 16, dead in their West Palm Beach home.
“It looks like she’s laid in bed but she doesn’t have a face,” the shaken neighbor tells the dispatcher of the suicidal mom. "I think the girl's up in bed with her but when I saw what was upstairs I had to run back downstairs."
Richard Berman tells 911 that he was heading to the house after his "ex-wife said she was going to harm the kids."
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"She sent me an email that she did the best thing for our family," Richard tells a police dispatcher as he called 911 en route to the home. "And then she sent her cousin a text that she was going to kill the kids and herself."
Richard and Jennifer Berman had only divorced in December, WPEC-TV reported, weeks after Jennifer’s mother had died last fall. Their home, on Pershing Way just off the Lake Worth Lagoon, was in foreclosure, the TV station reports, and the kids and their mother were to move out in February.
LOCAL10.COM
Jacqueline Berman, 16, was an accomplished musician. Her father found her body and those of her mother and brother after getting an alarming email from Jennifer Berman, his newly divorced wife.
"Oh, s--t," Richard Berman says in the newly released 911 call after he finds his dead son in the house. "I was just touching his head. He wasn't waking up. His alarm was on, he wasn't waking up, there's blood in his ear."
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The marital, and financial, woes in the family had existed for years.
Richard Berman originally filed for divorce in 2008 - 16 years after they first married, the Palm Beach Post reported. The family was living lush for years, but by early last year, Jennifer Berman was struggling to get by without her ex-husband any longer in her life. The mom-of-two could no longer pay her divorce attorney in April and was in such financial straits, she was forced to sell her late father's watch, the Palm Beach Post reported.
The family home had actually once belonged to Jennifer Berman's mother and had been in foreclosure since 2010.
RICHARD BERMAN VIA YOUTUBE
One dead teen was 16-year-old Alexander Berman, a talented musician. It appears that he was shot and killed by his distraught mother, who committed suicide, say authorities.
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"The husband has not paid the mortgage on the former marital home during the entire time of the dissolution of marriage proceeding," read documents filed in court in May by Jennifer Berman. "He has not contributed to the support of the wife or of the minor children. In fact, he has refused to pay for toilet paper, buys food and supplies for himself and keeps them where the wife and children cannot access them.”
Once a realtor, Jennifer Berman was forced to work 12-hour overnight shifts as a nurse to make any income to support her children.
Richard Berman is a successful realtor who sells multi-million dollar homes in South Florida.
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LOCAL10.COM
On Monday afternoon, police found the bodies of 15-year-old Jacqueline Berman, 16-year-old Alexander Berman and their mother Jennifer. The preliminary investigation suggests that Jennifer shot her own children and then turned the weapon on herself, say cops.
Neighbors recalled Jennifer Berman as a normal, loving mother — until recently.
“A couple of days ago, she was different,” Marian Sklodowski told WSVN-TV. “You could see it in her face, there was something missing, something disturbed in her mind. The conversation, the language, the eyes … something was missing.”
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The teens were talented musicians attending the nearby Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, a prestigious arts high school in southern Florida. Alex played cello while his older sister, a straight-A student, played violin.
Grief counselors were made available at the teens’ school this week as their friends and peers come to grips with a tragedy of which police have yet to determined a motive.
"Going through a divorce, foreclosure, a lot of that stuff which, it's an upsetting thing when you're going through a divorce and having to sell the beautiful house in this neighborhood, and it's just, she just seemed like she had been upset lately,” family friend Brian McManus told WSVN. "You can't fathom, you can't understand what's going on in someone's head for things like that to happen."
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