A South Carolina soldier went on a deadly rampage killing his former wife's 38-year-old colleague, his sons, and his stepdaughter before turning the gun on himself late Tuesday night.
Charles Slacks Jr., 42, was identified as the gunman who carried out the massacre at his ex-wife's Sumter home, miles away from Shaw Air Force Base killing an active Army soldier who happened to be there, his sons, aged 5 and 6, and their 11-year-old half-sister.
“We're not conditioned to bury children,” Sumter Police Chief Russell Roark said. “He put the weapon to his head and committed suicide.”
“Little children sleeping in their own bed...lives taken by a father and a stepfather, that's difficult to rationalize.”
Slacks, who served in the Army for seven years and worked as an ammunition logistics manager at the Shaw Air Force Base, was divorced from Sgt. Maj. Aletha Holliday, the only survivor of the bloodbath.
Holliday tried frantically to stop Slacks after he broke into her home using a key he still had to the family home.
“Anybody who has children – anybody who has empathy toward a child dying so violently could understand how that mother is feeling,” Roark added.
