For years, neighbors in the tranquil Long Island cul-de-sac where Joseph DeLucia had grown up with his mother saw him as a gloomy figure.
DeLucia, a seemingly friendless, unmarried 59-year-old auto mechanic who collected tools, spent lengthy periods sitting on his narrow concrete porch in Syosset, New York.
However, DeLucia was prone to furious outbursts, and neighbors and authorities said he had become more unstable in the two weeks following the death of his mother, Theresa DeLucia, 95. He objected to his three older siblings’ proposal to sell the house they had left long ago and divide the earnings four ways.
“He continued saying, ‘I’m going to be homeless, and my siblings are not going to help me. “They’re just going to sell the house,” a neighbor, Randi Marquis, said Monday, gazing at the DeLucias’ faded-blue Cape Cod house, which was partially concealed by untrimmed bushes.
On Sunday, Joseph DeLucia waited for his siblings and a niece to assemble in the house’s back den before meeting with a real estate agent.
As they sipped their Starbucks, he came, wielding a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, and shot all four of them multiple times, creating “one of the most horrific scenes I have ever seen,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder told a news conference Monday.
DeLucia then raced onto the front lawn, screaming, and moved a rusted patio chair from his usual seat on the porch into the center of the lawn, where he shot himself in the chest under a tree, according to authorities. On Monday, the chair remained on the grass close to where police discovered him dead with the same shotgun he used to murder his family.
Several neighbors on Wyoming Court, a loop of eight residences, had noticed DeLucia’s recent disintegration, but the warnings were never transmitted to authorities, police said Monday.
Only after the shooting did neighbors inform police about DeLucia’s comments, such as, “If you hear gunshots, don’t call police, because it will be too late,” Ryder said.
Following a massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022, New York state enhanced its red-flag laws, which allow authorities to remove firearms from those who are believed to be at risk of killing themselves or others.
If authorities had been told of DeLucia’s threats, they may have attempted to seize the weapon, Ryder added.
The shotgun was lawfully owned, according to Detective Capt. Stephen Fitzpatrick, commanding officer of Nassau’s homicide section, “but if he was reported to be mentally unstable, this would be illegal for him to possess.”
In Syosset, a safe, well-to-do community with decent schools about 30 minutes by drive from New York City, the family killing stood out as a stunning outlier among other legendary Long Island crimes. They include last summer’s charges that Rex Heuermann, a Massapequa family man, was responsible for the Gilgo Beach serial murders, as well as the 1974 Amityville Horror crimes, in which a man murdered his parents and four siblings.
There is limited information on so-called family annihilation — mass killings in which one person kills multiple relatives. According to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Mass Violence Research, one explanation for this is that law enforcement organizations do not always preserve thorough data on killer-victim ties.
Last year, the IndyStar, an Indianapolis-based news agency, investigated 227 such occurrences across the country between January 2020 and April 30, 2023, following a similar killing in Bloomington, Indiana. It discovered three broad scenarios: males who killed their partners and children, young men who killed their parents and siblings, and couples who murdered their children and themselves.
DeLucia did not fit nicely into any of these categories. According to authorities, he shot 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 responded to the scene were offered counseling, according to the commissioner.
DeLucia’s shotgun held six shells, so he most likely reloaded once while murdering his relatives and again before shooting himself, according to the detective captain.
According to police, DeLucia’s sole prior criminal history was a 1983 DUI offense. They performed a 2022 wellness check at the house but did not consider DeLucia to be a threat.
During the search, police discovered outdated mental medication at the home.
“He was kind of a hoarder, spent all his money on his tools and stuff,” Fitzpatrick told me. “The house was jam-packed with auto repair gear and equipment.
“He was living there his entire life, never lived on his own,” he told me. “So you can see the mindset where his world was now changing, at 59 years old, and he was panicking.”
Sandy Landsman, a psychotherapist who lives across the street from DeLucia, said he appeared to struggle emotionally and was often guarded and distant from his 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 told me. “I didn’t think he was that great a risk.”
However, on Sunday, after hearing DeLucia’s screams followed by a gunshot, he stated, “My first thought was that he killed himself.”
Marquis stated that she attempted to convince DeLucia that, with his portion of the inheritance from the sale of the property, he would be able to find housing. But he remained unconvinced.
“He intended to wipe out the whole family,” Marquis claimed. “His thinking was, “If I can’t stay here, I might as well take everyone with me.”
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