The light is gone for Lili Parker Owens.
Parker Owens just bought a house in Gary around Christmas time and with it a whole bunch of baby chicks that her granddaughters Aurorah, Ava and Alayna had already decided which ones were their own to mind. Her middle daughter, Briana Payne, had just asked her husband, Robert Payne, for a divorce and was bringing the girls to live with Parker Owens and start a new, safe life, she said.
The four went to their former house — a mobile home in the 6700 block of E. 9th Avenue in Lake Station — on the evening of February 20 to grab some clothes and whatever else they needed. The next afternoon, Lake Station Police made a welfare check and found the family dead from gunshot wounds in what police and the Lake County Coroner’s office have ruled murder-suicide.
“It’s so dark and quiet here now,” an exhausted Parker Owens said through tears Monday. “(Briana’s) siblings can’t even talk. They’re hiding away in their own holes.”
Briana Payne’s and the girls’ lives were nothing short of miserable for as long as Parker Owens could remember. Robert Payne, who’d suffered from depression for much of their marriage, seemed to have had a psychotic break and took his sickness out on Briana Payne as a result.
“He stalked her,” Parker Owens said bluntly. “He had a tracker on her phone, and would show up wherever she was just to make sure she was where she said she was going to be.
“She had just asked him for a divorce, but rather than let her go, he shot all of them.”
Eileen Meadows, Briana Payne’s boss at Sandra Lee’s Home Care in Crown Point, confirmed Parker-Owens’s assessment. When Briana didn’t show up for work on February 21, Meadows called Parker Owens, who then called police.
“She never missed a day of work,” Meadows said. “She had things going on with her husband, but she was making good choices.
“There were days he would call her 50 times to see where she was, and there was nothing she could do. People really do have mental health crises, but I couldn’t have ever imagined this would happen. She was such a kind, loving person.”
Indiana ranks in the top five states in the nation with the highest rates of domestic violence, women’s shelter Caring Place CEO Jessica Luth told the Post-Tribune in December. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 42.5% of Hoosier women and 27.9% of Hoosier men experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner sexual violence and/or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes.
Firearms also exacerbate the impact of domestic violence, which adds to its prevalence here, Luth said. According to the 2020 Indiana Domestic Violence Fatality Review Report, the most recent report available, 72% — or 66 out of 91 — of the domestic violence fatalities for that year in Indiana were due to firearms.
And 11 of the fatal domestic violence cases that year were murder-suicides, according to the report.
In Northwest Indiana, it’s at least the third murder-suicide in the past three months. On Feb. 15, Amanda Dusek, 42, of Worth, Illinois, was fatally inside a Merrillville gas station shot by her boyfriend Douglas Venable, 45, of Lake Station, who then shot himself. On Nov. 29, 2024, Portage High School secretary Brandy Manville, 46, was killed at her home by her estranged husband Charles Manville, 45, who also shot their 21-year-old daughter before shooting himself.
Most murder-suicide victims are female, according to a 2023 Violence Policy Center report. It also stated that the killers in murder-suicides are almost always male; most murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; murder-suicides almost always involve a gun; children are both the victims of and witnesses to murder-suicides; and most murder-suicides occur in the home.
If it’s up to Lili Parker Owens, she doesn’t want the world to remember Briana, Aurorah, Ava and Alayna for what Robert Payne did to them. She wants people to know how there was never a quiet moment when the little girls were around.
“They were tornados, just so full of life, even during all the fighting,” Parker Owens said.
As for her daughter, Parker Owens said she was “truly special,” even though she knows all parents say that about their kids.
“We were working on the house and had plans,” she said. “Briana was PTO secretary at the girls’ school, and they were involved in everything. No one can wrap their heads around it.
And true to her very being, Briana, she said, did try to get help for her husband. But even she couldn’t help him in the end.
“Mental health is a real, real real thing, and if you even suspect someone is going through something, please, please try to get them help,” Parker Owens said. “It’s too common for people to think ‘It’s not going to happen to me’ — until it does, and then it’s too late.
“No one else needs to go through this.”
A memorial service for Briana, Aurorah, Ava and Alayna Payne is pending; Guy & Allen Funeral Homes is handling the arrangements, Parker Owens said. For anyone who would like to donate toward the service, a GoFundMe has been set up at https://www.gofundme.com/f/in-memory-of-briana-and-her-beautiful-girls.
Senior Content Editor Amy Lavalley contributed.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.