Investigators found no signs of forced entry inside a Gage Park house where six family members were found slain in the Southwest Side neighborhood, Chicago police announced Friday.
Chicago Police Chief of Detective Eugene Roy said Friday that all of the victims suffered blunt trauma.
Officers conducting a welfare check discovered the bodies of two women, two men and two children aged 10 and 13 around 1:30 p.m. Thursday on the 5700 block of South California. A concerned co-worker called police after after one of the men found in the home had not showed up to work for two days.
Investigators were working to piece together what exactly happened inside the small brick home tucked away in a typically quiet neighborhood near 57th Street and California Avenue. Asked whether it could have been a murder-suicide, Interim Chicago Police Superintendent John Escalante told reporters Friday it was "a possibility."
Police said in a Friday morning news conference there had been no sign of forced entry and all the doors had been locked when officers arrived.
Friends told NBC 5 the victims were a “good family” from Mexico with no known problems.
Police have revealed few details on a potential motive in the case, but said there is no threat to the community.
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The victims' identities will be released after the Cook County medical examiner has performed autopsies Friday morning, Roy said. He said it appeared the victims were members of the same family.
Six people lived in the home — a couple, their son, their daughter and the daughter's two children — a relative said.
"They were a normal family. Everything was fine," Noemi Martinez, 29, said from Dallas during a phone interview in Spanish. She said her husband was a nephew and cousin of the home's residents.
Martinez said the father worked at a factory in Chicago and the mother was a housewife. They were originally from the Mexican state of Guanajuato and had lived in Chicago for about a decade, Martinez said.
"Right now, we just want to know who did this. They didn't deserve this. We don't understand what happened," she said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
