Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 7, 1993 TAG: 9304070150
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE NOTE: LEDE
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
GUNMAN KILLS 3, HIMSELF
Shocked investigators were trying to learn Tuesday what made Sol Fox snap.About dinner time Monday night, he carried a semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun through the kitchen door of a Clintwood home and killed his ex-girlfriend, her father and her 13-month-old daughter.
Two other children escaped through a window, and his ex-girlfriend's mother crawled to a porch after Fox shot her in the knee.
As Dickenson County deputies and town police surrounded the house, Fox turned the gun on himself.
"It is the worst I've seen since I've been in law enforcement," said chief sheriff's investigator Ron Kendrick, a police officer for 13 years.
Authorities knew that Fox, 33, and Jutannia Estep, his ex-girlfriend, hadn't been getting along. He had been arrested Saturday and charged with assaulting her and brandishing a gun at her. He had been released on $2,000 bail.
About 6 p.m. Monday, he walked into the kitchen of Freda Estep, Jutannia's mother, and shot her.
She dragged herself to the porch, yelling for help, as Fox continued his deadly rounds.
Inside, she could hear the blast of a shotgun as Fox went from room to room. Two children who were watching television scurried out a bedroom window and ran to safety.
Even as sheriff's deputies and Clintwood police officers were trying to carry Freda Estep to safety - out of the line of fire - they could hear gunshots inside the house.
"We went into the yard and picked her up," Kendrick said. "As we walked around the house, we heard one shot and then we heard the other shot."
After learning who was doing the shooting, police tried to use a loudspeaker to talk to Fox.
"Come out with your hands up," they pleaded.
They heard another shotgun blast, and then it was quiet inside the house.
When investigators went into the kitchen, they found Jutannia Estep, 26, dead on the floor. Her 13-month-old daughter, Angela, had been shot to death beside her. They said it looked as though the mother had been trying to get to her child when she was shot.
Rick Mullins of Mullins Funeral Home said the baby was Fox's child.
Farther inside the house, they found Edgar Estep, Jutannia's father, between the living room and the bedroom, shot to death.
Then they discovered Fox's body. Mullins said Fox also had been shot in the stomach with a .38-caliber pistol, but he apparently died from a shotgun blast to the head. State police said two guns were found in the house.
After surgery Tuesday afternoon, Freda Estep was moved into a room at St. Mary's Hospital in Norton. The bodies of her three family members were sent to the medical examiner's office in Roanoke for autopsies.
Keywords:
FATALITY