The Soul of Adolescence by Patricia Lyons

She alerted the police, who were able to intercept the murderer outside the grandparents’ home, just in time. While the gunman had been shooting her parents, she heard him threaten to find her grandparents and kill them as well. When she was sure he was gone, she got to a phone and called the police. She played dead among her deceased family members until the man left the house. But one of the children- the fifteen-year-old girl who had let him in-was still alive even though she had been shot in the head. He shot every family member execution-style and then walked out. What followed was a bloodbath that still haunts me. He entered the house to find his sister-in-law, her husband, and their five children home. He knocked on the door and was let in by his sister-in-law’s fifteen-year-old daughter. When he could not find her at her home, he went looking at her sister’s house in the small town of Spring, Texas. An armed and angry man went looking for his former wife. The original story was gruesome and unthinkable.

The anchor was introducing the next segment: a follow-up story to a horrific tragedy I had read about three days earlier. I was surfing channels trying to find weather reports for my day. I was sitting on the edge of the bed just a foot or two away from the large television crammed into a discount-size room. I was in room 210 in a hotel near a beach taking a two-day reading and writing retreat.

Iremember exactly where I was when I decided to write this book.

The Soul of Adolescence by Patricia Lyons