Josh Powell, who had become a person of interest in the disappearance of his wife Susan Powell back on December 6, 2009, killed himself and their two sons, 7 year-old Charlie and 5 year-old Braden, in a planned explosion at his home in Tacoma, Washington on Sunday (February 5).
The explosion happened shortly after a case worker delivered the boys to their daddy’s home, and the man’s lawyer Jeffrey Bassett, who was working on the kids’ custody case, received an apologetic e-mail with three simple words.
“I’m sorry, goodbye,” it read. Josh had just learned he was not likely to regain the custody of his sons, after his father, Steve Powell, was arrested and charged with child pornography in September of 2011.
This story is shocking America and the world, but according to Josh’s brother-in-law Kirk Graves, he decided to kill himself and the kids to prevent them for revealing anything about the disappearance of their mother during an overnight camping trip.
“I think this was a last-ditch effort on his part to hurt everyone around him and escape all of the problems,” Kirk Graves told PEOPLE. “Regardless of the impact on the boys, he just wanted to hurt everybody else.”
“Not only this a horrible, horrible thing, but it just came out of nowhere,” Graves told PEOPLE. “It leaves you in a total state of shock. Why did he do this to the boys? I’ve been asking myself that I don’t know how many times.”
Family members claim the boys had started talking about the night their mom went missing, which could have triggered Josh’s desperate reacting. Josh also accused the legal guardians of the kids, grandparents Chuck and Judy Cox, of turning them against him.
The father-of-two always denied any involvement in his wife’s disappearance. A year after the fact, he even suggested Susan had run off with a man from Utah – Steven Koecher, who disappeared around the same time.
