U.S.

Quintuple Slaying In Twin Cities

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

October 20, 2000 / 8:00 AM EDT / CBS

"Something awful happened here."

Those words, from a woman in Lino Lakes, sum up the shock waves spreading through the Twin Cities as a manhunt continues for a man suspected of killing his sister, her husband and their three young children.

CBS News Station WCCO-TV's Tony Berlin reports the bodies were found Thursday in the family's suburban Minneapolis home after a concerned co-worker of the father's called police because he hadn't shown up at his job. Police would not say how they were killed.

Police Chief Dave Pecchia says the victims' names have been withheld pending positive identification and notification of relatives, but the children are reported to be ages 1, 9 and 12.

A child in the neighborhood could not believe the news that her 9-year-old friend was dead.

"(Wednesday) night, I was over there, and she was showing me things from school," the shocked neighbor told WCCO-TV.

"It's just hard to imagine that something that awful could happen here," said another neighbor.

The suspect is identified as Lawrence Scott Dame, a former state prison inmate who was released the day before the killings from the Anoka County jail where he was being held for allegedly stealing one of the family's cars.

Police had been called to the house twice recently for disturbances involving Dame, once for theft and once for what Pecchia calls a "domestic-related" situation.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reports that as a condition of his release, Dame was supposed to report to a hospital for a mental health crisis intervention immediately after he left jail. Don Ilse, director of field services for Anoka County Community Corrections, told the newspaper that Dame spoke with a mental health professional at the hospital.

Family members said they unsuccessfully tried admitting Dame to the hospital after his release from jail Wednesday.

Hannah Dame told the St. Paul Pioneer Press her son had been acting strangely and recently claimed to hear voices. She quoted her son as saying, " 'The spirits said your family is going to kill you. Well, I better kill everyone before they kill me.' "

Dame was sent to prison in February 1996 on an assault conviction for slashing a man's throat with a knife, according to the state Department of Corrections' Web site and local news reports. He was released in February.