A Louisiana pastor shot his wife in front of the couple’s three children before turning the gun on himself inside a hotel in Mississippi on Wednesday. 

He has been named locally as Danny Prenell Jr., 25, the lead pastor at the Bright Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church in Pineville, Louisiana. Multiple Facebook posts identify his wife as Gabby Prenell, 27. The couple have three children together. 

In a Facebook post that was sent from the Hampton Inn hotel where the shooting took place, Prenell captioned a picture with his wife and kids: ‘I may not be a perfect man, but I’ll always be a family man.’ 

A picture from the scene published by The Enterprise-Journal showed blood-stained floors close to the elevators in the hotel’s lobby in McComb, Mississippi. The shooting took place around 3:30pm. Prenell is alleged to have shot his wife twice and then himself, investigators said. 

Authorities have not commented on Prenell or his wife’s condition. A Facebook post from a friend of Gabby’s said that the mother was ‘still fighting’ in an intensive care unit. 

The picture was accompanied with this caption 

The bloody hallway in the aftermath of the shooting 

Both were rushed to the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Their children are in the custody of child protective services. 

According to Prenell’s Facebook page, he’s a former sheriff’s deputy with the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Department up until as recently as December 2022. 

On April 6, Prenell paid tribute to his wife on her birthday calling her ‘my queen’ and ‘the woman that I love and owe my life to.

‘I’ve watched your growth on all levels and you’re a great mother, wife, and my best friend. I’m proud to be your husband because you are a woman of class, discretion, integrity, and most importantly….you’re a woman of God,’ he added.

The pastor regularly spoke about his self-growth in Facebook posts. 

‘At the age of 25, I often hear that I’m far beyond my years. However, I never get satisfied with where I am….I’m constantly looking for more,’ he wrote on April 16. 

‘People with small minds will keep you locked up into what can fit into their heads. The God I serve doesn’t have a limit, and I’m staying faithful because I know my cup shall run over,’ he added. 

The horror unfolded at this Hampton Inn in McComb, Mississippi, around 3:30pm on June 21

In a Facebook post on his wife’s birthday in April, Prenell called her ‘his queen’

Danny Prenell Jr’s condition has not been made public while a friend of Gabby’s said that she is ‘still fighting’ in the ICU 

Prenell is a former sheriff’s deputy who left the force in December 2022

Domestic shootings have become a disturbingly common tragedy across the country. They’ve happened nearly every 3.5 weeks for the last two decades on average. In 2022 there were 17 of them, according to a database, compiled by multiple media organizations. 

Ten were murder-suicides, and 14 were shootings. The database defines a mass killing as four or more people slain, not including the assailant.

Sequatchie, Tennessee, is one of more than 30 communities sent reeling by a family mass killing in the last two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty and spares no race or class. 

A family mass killing — where four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator — happened each of the last two years in places as large as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona. 

Motives can remain speculative in family killings in which assailants take their own lives, but police often cite financial or relationship issues as the causes. 

Family mass killings immediately capture the attention of people in a community, but rarely garner the level of national attention received by mass killings at schools, places of worship or restaurants, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied familicides and mass killings for decades. 

Fox, who helped compile and maintains the database for the AP and USA Today, said that’s because it doesn’t carry the same kind of fear with the public. He noted police often issue messages saying there is no danger to the public shortly after the killings are discovered.

‘It’s a nice safe community, but family massacres are independent of the crime rate in the local area,’ he said. ‘We are talking about internal factors, and I think that’s why it’s hard for people to see themselves in these situations and why the response is to mourn instead of fear.’

Family mass killings are in fact the most common type of mass killing, making up about 45 percent of the 415 mass shootings since 2006, according to the database. They happen twice as frequently as mass shootings in which members of the public are killed.

Michael Haight, 42, fatally shot his wife, her mother and the couple’s five kids after he was investigated for child abuse in one of the most infamous murder suicides in recent years 

Most, but not all, involve handguns, only about a third involve households with a previous occurrence of domestic violence and most of the assailants have no violent history or criminal past, Fox said.

There is no governmental agency tracking murder-suicides nationally, so a few years ago policy analysts at the Violence Policy Center — a nonprofit educational organization that conducts research and public education on violence in the U.S. — began tracking details from news accounts to produce an annual report. 

The latest version from 2020 looked at murder-suicides including many mass killings during the first six months of 2019.

The study found 81 percent of murder-suicides happened at home and 65 percent involved intimate partners. 

The study also found that among murder-suicides where more than three people aside from the assailant were killed, six of the 10 during those six months were incidents in which a person killed their children, partner and themselves.

Fox said most of the killings fall into two categories. The first is murder by proxy, in which the killer is motivated by anger or resentment and kills the children who are seen as an extension of their partner. 

The second is suicide by proxy motivated by despondency or depression, most often a job loss, and the assailant kills the children as an extension of themselves.

‘He wants to spare them the misery of living in this awful world,’ Fox said. ‘Over the years, there’s been an eclipse in community. There was a time decades ago if you had trouble feeding your family or if you had lost your job, neighbors would come over with casseroles and they would offer emotional support. Many people don’t know their neighbors these days.’