DETROIT – A man killed his mother and a co-worker Wednesday and seriously wounded a teenage niece in an early morning shooting spree that ended when he committed suicide, police said.
Jamal Samuels, 22, shot his mother, 56-year-old Annie Samuels, and his 14-year-old niece multiple times at their home on Detroit's northwest side, police spokesman James Tate said.
Samuels then drove to the United Parcel Service facility in Livonia where he worked and shot a co-worker in a parking lot about 3 a.m., police said.
"It appears he was probably laying in wait," Livonia police Lt. Ben McDermott said. He said Samuels, a part-time employee, had been at the UPS facility earlier that night, but had left because there was no work for him. McDermott identified the victim as 23-year-old Kelton Lamarr Kidd II of Detroit.
There was no information on a motive in any of the shootings. Tate said family members told police that Samuels had "mental issues."
From Livonia, Samuels apparently drove to another co-worker's home nearby in Wayne County's Redford Township, where he took his own life. He was found dead in his vehicle in the co-worker's driveway, Police Capt. Scott McLeay said.
After the initial shootings at the family home, Samuels set fire to a bedroom in an apparent attempt to burn down the house, but the blaze fizzled out before firefighters arrived, Tate said. The mother was killed and the niece was hospitalized with gunshot wounds. Authorities said she was expected to survive.
Wallace Crawford, the father of the second, uninjured co-worker, told Detroit radio station WWJ that the police found the body after his son reported what the family thought was an abandoned vehicle in their driveway.
"I'm still shaken up," he said. "I just thank God that it all ended before anything else could happen." He said Samuels knew where his son lived because he had given him a ride home from work.
A spokesman for Atlanta-based UPS Inc., Steve Holmes, said the Livonia sorting hub was open as usual Wednesday. "Obviously, everybody at UPS is terribly saddened by it," he said.