Shock, heartbreak on streets outside murder-suicide home

ORLANDO, Fla. — The helicopters circling overhead brought out curious neighbors around Lake Nona’s Lake District Lane, who approached the people gathered near the news cameras and crime scene tape to ask what was going on.

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The news that five people, including two little girls, were found dead inside a nearby home brought visible signs of distress to their faces.

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“Being here in this neighborhood, you feel touched by it,” Jenny Conliffe said.

Not many people knew the victims of the apparent murder-suicide, and no one could pin down exactly when it happened.

Justin Rossilini described the family as a middle-aged Hispanic man and wife, an adult son approximately 22 years old, and the two girls, who he said were probably six or seven years old.

He said he interacted with the son late last week.

“Seemed very normal,” he recalled. “Very, very nice. Like I said, they’ve only been there for two months.”

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Otherwise, he said the family kept to itself. The girls rarely played in the yard or interacted with the other kids in the neighborhood, though there hadn’t been much time for friendships to strike up.

His fiancé, Heather Collins, said it hit home for her as a mother of two children herself.

“It’s actually scary if you ask me, that something that horrific could be happening right there close to you and there’s nobody there to help,” she said. “I really wish I had heard some sort of commotion and been able to act on it.”

She and Rossilini estimated that whatever occurred happened over the weekend, since they had been home since Monday morning and had heard nothing.

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The first sign anything was amiss, they recalled, was an officer peering through the window of the car in the house’s driveway Tuesday morning, though he left when they were out running errands.

“We really felt that everything was okay and I was very relieved,” she said. “Now, I am seeing that that is absolutely not the case.”

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