On Wednesday morning, David Kellermann, acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant, was found dead at his Northern Virginia home in an apparent suicide.
A Hopkins study last year showed that suicide was rising among middle-class whites. Brenner says those who are well off are often those with the most to lose when their money disappears. Creature comforts, social status - it can all be tied up in their personal net worth.
Of course, few who suffer a financial trauma commit suicide or kill their families.
"Stressors don't affect everyone in the same way," said Dr. James Potash, a psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. "The rain falls everywhere, but not everyone gets wet. Some people have umbrellas. Some people are more vulnerable to stressors than others."
Little quantitative research has been done on people who kill their families before killing themselves, mostly because there have been so few cases, said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Violence Policy Center in Washington, which has examined murder-suicides in general. But those numbers seem to be rising, she said.
Criminologist Jack Levin, who has studied mass killings for 25 years at Northeastern University in Boston, said men who kill their families and then themselves - and it is almost always men - are called "family annihilators."
Those who are not motivated by revenge may be driven by a perverse sense of altruism. They have suffered a catastrophic loss, and in hard economic times the losses can pile up fast. In this recession, Levin said, people have not only lost jobs but also much of their savings, something that may seem impossible to overcome.
"When neighbors and friends all describe the killer as a 'devoted father and dedicated husband,' that's exactly what he is," Levin said. "He feels responsible for them, and he believes this life is so miserable that they would all be better off reuniting in the hereafter. He certainly does not want to leave his family with the stigma of his own suicide or if he kills his wife, he doesn't want to leave his kids without parents."
Baltimore County police say that William Parente, a tax and estate lawyer from Long Island, N.Y., beat and asphyxiated his wife and two daughters before killing himself. On Monday, police found their bodies in their room at a Towson hotel. Federal authorities were investigating what happened to a client's $450,000 investment with Parente.
