His siblings gathered to sell the family home, so he shot them

For years, Joseph DeLucia cut a foreboding figure to neighbors in the quiet Long Island cul-de-sac home where he lived his entire life with his mother.

A seemingly friendless, unmarried 59-year-old auto mechanic who hoarded tools, DeLucia spent long stretches sitting on his narrow concrete porch in Syosset, New York.

But DeLucia was prone to angry outbursts, and neighbors and authorities said he had grown more unstable in the two weeks since the death of his mother, Theresa DeLucia, 95. He chafed at his three older siblings’ plan to sell the home they had left long ago and split the proceeds four ways.

“He kept saying, ‘I’m going to be homeless — my siblings are not going to help me. They’re just going to sell the house,’” a neighbor, Randi Marquis, said Monday while staring at the DeLucias’ faded-blue Cape Cod house, partly obscured by untrimmed bushes.

On Sunday, Joseph DeLucia waited until his siblings and a niece gathered in the rear den of the house to meet with a real estate agent.

As they were sipping their Starbucks, he suddenly appeared brandishing a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and shot all four of them repeatedly, leaving “one of the most horrific scenes I have ever seen,” the Nassau County Police commissioner, Patrick Ryder, said at a news conference Monday.

DeLucia then ran onto the front lawn screaming and dragged a rusty patio chair from his favorite spot on the porch onto the center of the lawn, where he shot himself in the chest under a tree, police said. On Monday, the chair remained on the lawn next to where police found him dead from the same shotgun he used to kill his family.

Several neighbors on Wyoming Court, a loop of eight houses, had noticed DeLucia’s recent unraveling, but the warnings were never relayed to authorities, police officials said Monday.

Only after the shooting did neighbors tell police of DeLucia’s comments, such as, “If you hear gunshots, don’t call police, because it will be too late,” Ryder said.

After a massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, New York state strengthened its red-flag laws, which allow authorities to seize guns from people deemed to be at risk of harming themselves or others.

Had police been notified of DeLucia’s threats, they could have tried to take the shotgun, Ryder said.

Detective Capt. Stephen Fitzpatrick, commanding officer of Nassau’s homicide unit, said the shotgun was legally owned, “but if he was reported to be mentally unstable, this would be illegal for him to possess.”

In Syosset, a safe, well-to-do suburb with good schools, some 30 minutes by car from the New York City line, the family massacre stood out as a shocking outlier along with other notorious Long Island crimes. They include last summer’s accusations that a family man from Massapequa, Rex Heuermann, committed the Gilgo Beach serial murders, and the so-called Amityville Horror killings in 1974, when a man killed his parents and four siblings.

There is little data on so-called family annihilation — mass killings where one person kills several relatives. Part of the reason is that law enforcement agencies do not always keep comprehensive data on the relationships between the killer and the victims, according to a 2022 study by the Journal of Mass Violence Research.

The IndyStar, a news organization in Indianapolis, last year examined 227 such cases across the country that occurred between January 2020 and April 30, 2023, folllowing a similar killing in Bloomington, Indiana. It found three major scenarios: men who killed their partners and children, young men who killed parents and siblings, and couples who killed their children and themselves.

DeLucia did not neatly fit any of those categories. In all, police said, he fired 12 times inside the home, killing his brother, Frank DeLucia, 63, of Durham, North Carolina; his sisters Joanne Kearns, 69, of Tampa, Florida, and Tina Hammond, 64, of East Patchogue, New York; and Tina’s daughter, Victoria Hammond, 30, also of East Patchogue.

Officers who came to the scene have been offered counseling, the commissioner said.

DeLucia’s shotgun had a six-shell capacity, so he presumably stopped to reload once while shooting his relatives and again before shooting himself, the detective captain said.

Police officials said DeLucia’s only prior criminal history was a 1983 arrest on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol. They conducted a 2022 wellness check at the home but did not deem DeLucia to be a threat.

Police officials said outdated psychiatric medication was found in the home during a search.

“He was kind of a hoarder, spent all his money on his tools and stuff,” Fitzpatrick said. “The house was pretty much packed with tools and stuff involved in auto mechanics.

“He was living there his entire life, never lived on his own,” he said. “So you can see the mind-set where his world was now changing, at 59 years old, and he was panicking.”

Sandy Landsman, a psychologist who lives across the street from DeLucia, said he seemed to struggle emotionally and was often guarded and distant to neighbors.

“It never occurred to me he would do this, but I knew he had a very hard time after his mom’s death and was afraid he was going to have to leave the house,” Landsman said. “I didn’t think he was that great a risk.”

But on Sunday after hearing DeLucia’s screams followed by a gunshot, he said, “My first thought was that he killed himself.”

Marquis said she tried to reassure DeLucia that, especially with his share of the inheritance from the sale of the house, he would be able to secure housing. But he remained unconvinced.

“His intentions were to wipe out the whole family,” Marquis said. “His mind-set was, “If I can’t stay here, I might as well take everyone with me.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.