Stephanie Parente wasn't the kind of student who would blow off a college chemistry exam. The 19-year-old Loyola sophomore and speech pathology major was far too studious for that, her friends said.
After she didn't show up for class Monday, college officials called the Sheraton hotel in Towson, where her family was staying on a visit from Long Island, N.Y. There, inside a locked room about 3 p.m. Monday, a hotel employee found the bodies of Stephanie Parente, her 11-year-old sister, Catherine, and their parents, William, 59, and Betty, 58.
They were not shot or stabbed, and one of the parents was likely responsible for the murder-suicide, Cpl. Michael Hill, a Baltimore County police spokesman, said Tuesday. He declined to give details or say whether there was evidence of a motive.
"With sadness, we report a whole family is dead," Hill said at a news conference Tuesday. He said more information would be released Wednesday.
The family lived in Garden City on Long Island, a small, upper-middle-class community with one of the largest shopping malls in the world. William Parente was a tax and estate lawyer with a midtown Manhattan office. Betty Parente was a homemaker and a charity fundraiser. Catherine was a sixth-grader at a Garden City middle school.
Stephanie Parente also had attended Garden City public schools. At Loyola College, she was a coxswain for the men's crew team and a player on the club field hockey team. She danced at school rallies and loved going out. She wanted to be a dentist.
"She was always full of life and happy and smiling," said Stefanie Spain, a sophomore who lived in Parente's dorm during her freshman year. "She was always making people laugh."
Dave Thompson, a sophomore who was on the crew team with Stephanie, said she had helped out with Habitat for Humanity last year and was planning to study in England in the fall.
Robert J. Krener, who owns a real estate brokerage, said he sold the Parentes their Garden City house about 12 years ago. Then the Kreners moved into the house next door about 2 1/2 years ago.
"You can't find finer people. And the daughters - oh, my God," Krener said. "I remember when they were trying to make the choices for [Stephanie] to go to college."
Krener said he didn't know the family had gone to Maryland to visit their daughter at Loyola. When police came to his house Monday and started asking questions about them, Krener became worried. He and his wife called Betty Parente's cell phone and didn't get an answer. They called the Parentes' condo in Westhampton. Nothing.
