Like any mother would, Karina Rodríguez stayed with her youngest child while he was being treated at the hospital. She let the boy’s father take her three older children to get something to eat.
It would be the last time she would see the man and her “three little angels” alive.
“I am devastated with my heart in pieces,” Rodríguez said on a fundraising page . “My world was my children and I was mother and father to them so that they never lacked anything, and they took the lives of my little angels from me.”
According to Gwinnett County police investigators, it was 56-year-old Jose Plasencia — the father of Rodríguez’s youngest child — who killed her three other children before turning the gun on himself. The bodies of all four were found early Wednesday in Lucky Shoals Park, less than three miles from their home in Norcross.
But why? While Rodríguez faces the heavy burden of burying her children, questions about a possible motive remained unanswered and could remain so with the gunman dead.