An employee called 911 after discovering a 'dead body' in a Maryland hotel. Officials later found the bodies of William Parente, his wife and two daughters who died in an apparent murder-suicide.
The bodies of a New York lawyer, his wife and their two daughters were found in a hotel room in this Baltimore suburb, the authorities said Tuesday, apparently the victims of a murder-suicide.
Employees of the Sheraton Baltimore North Hotel found the bodies of William Parente, 59; his wife, Betty Parente, 58; and their children, Stephanie, 19, a sophomore at nearby Loyola College, and Catherine, 11, on Monday afternoon inside their locked room on the 10th floor, said Cpl. Michael Hill of the Baltimore County police. The employees went to the room after the Parentes did not check out on time Monday, Corporal Hill said.
The couple and their younger daughter had traveled to Towson from their home in Garden City, on Long Island, to visit Stephanie, a speech and language pathology major at Loyola who had been accepted to a program of study next year in Newcastle, England.
Corporal Hill would not say how the victims died or whether a suicide note was left. He said that he thought one of the parents was responsible but that the authorities were still searching for a motive.
“Was it economic reasons?” Corporal Hill said. “Was it family reasons? We just don’t know.”
Mr. Parente, a 1974 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, specialized in estate planning and had his own practice in Manhattan. No one returned calls to his office on Tuesday.
The deaths shocked people on Long Island who knew the family.
Betty Parente was on the board of the Tri Town Auxiliary of United Cerebral Palsy of Nassau and volunteered with the Girl Scouts and the American Cancer Society, friends said. A neighbor, Robert Krener, who said he sold the Parentes their house 12 years ago, called the deaths “an anomaly on a scale I can’t begin to fathom.”
“He was a hard-working guy; not once did I ever see the slightest friction between the two of them,” Mr. Krener said. “I knew of no financial problems, and they didn’t seem to skimp on anything.”
“It sounds so trite,” he said, “but they were the most wonderful couple. Something must have been terribly wrong. The community just loved them and embraced them.”
Corporal Hill said that the Parentes had breakfast together on Sunday morning, and that a hotel employee saw them together on Sunday afternoon, the last time they were seen alive.
