3 dead in East Greenbush murder-suicide

PHOTOGRAPHER: Marc Schultz

East Greenbush detectives at the house located at 58 Rockrose Dr. in East Greenbush on Tuesday morning, where the bodies of Angela Mtambu and her daughters Eudora Thurston, age 6, and Cara Thurston, age 9, were found.

Share on Facebook

Save

A mother who was investigated in June after allegedly threatening to harm herself and her children died along with her two young daughters overnight Tuesday in a murder-suicide, according to authorities.

The deaths came three months to the day after her older son committed suicide in the same room, officials said.

Authorities arrived at 58 Rockrose Drive early Tuesday morning and attempted to treat Angela Mtambu, 47, and her two daughters — 11-year-old Callidora Thurston and 6-year-old Eudora Thurston — but the three were later pronounced dead at Albany Medical Center.

Following an autopsy, Rensselaer County Medical Examiner Michael Sikirica ruled that the three died from inhaling nitrogen gas and that it was a murder-suicide.

Mtambu had been the focus of an Amber Alert on June 1 after East Greenbush police learned she was traveling from Dallas, Texas, to Rensselaer County with the aim of doing harm to her family, authorities said Tuesday.

She was apprehended in Pennsylvania and held for 20 days, but was released recently and reunited with her family in the past week, authorities said. The children had been in the care of relatives.

“The two children involved had previously been the topic of an Amber Alert by this department … after receiving information from a relative in Texas that Angela Mtambu had intended them harm and gone on a cross-country trip,” Police Chief Christopher Lavin said at a late-morning news conference. “Her intention was for her and her two children to be deceased at the same residence her son, Mitchell Gwatida, had succumbed on April 1.”

Pennsylvania State Police stopped Mtambu in Harrisburg. She underwent psychiatric evaluation before rejoining the family June 22. She was subsequently being seen by social service workers in Rensselaer County, Lavin said.

“There were no court orders or orders of protection placed at that time,” Lavin said.

“She apparently did not exhibit behavior that is needed to trigger a preventative-custody arrest,” Lavin later said. “I can’t think of anything under the law that we could have done.”

Rensselaer Chief Counsel Teresa Beaudoin would not discuss whether the Department of Social Services had even known of Mtambu, citing confidentiality laws.

“We are unable to discuss the particulars of any case,” she said.

Therefore, she added, she could not answer questions about whether DSS missed indications of what was to come.

After Mtambu returned to East Greenbush June 27, two of Mtambu’s brothers were staying with her in the duplex townhouse she has owned for 12 years, police said. She was only allowed to sleep in the same room as the two children as of Sunday night.

The bodies, discovered after town police broke through a locked door at 1:45 a.m. Tuesday, were found in the same downstairs bedroom where the older offspring, 23-year-old Gwatida, had died of “self-inflicted suffocation.” Lavin would not go into details as to how Gwatida died, but said there is a possibility that Mtambu was trying to use the same method to kill herself and her daughters.

“People there reported their concern for the safety of family members after hearing what turned out to be the sound of escaping gas,” Lavin said. Mtambu’s brothers were home at the time. “When [police] arrived they had to break down the bedroom door.

“When first responders broke into the bedroom they encountered a very high concentration of an unknown gas,” he added. The gas turned out to be nitrogen that apparently came from metal bottles.

No first responders were sickened, Lavin said to the best of his knowledge. He did say compressed nitrogen has industrial and medical applications; Mtambu worked as a traveling nurse.

“We are still very limited to the details,” Lavin said. “It is an active ongoing investigation.”

Authorities, neighbors and police said Mtambu had been struggling to get over the April 1 suicide of her son, who served in the Air Force from 2010-13. Lavin described him as separated from the service before his death. Neighbors and at least one media outlet said she believed her son may have been murdered, even though the official cause of death was that it was self-inflicted.

“She questioned his death as any mother would,” said a neighbor who declined to be identified. “It was inexplicable to her.”

“What a tragedy,” he said.

Mtambu’s brother Bernard Pamberi told CBS 6 the mother had a history with social services and was struggling to deal with the suicide of her son.

The neighbor said he did not know the family well but he said they were acquaintances in this quiet neighborhood. He saw the family last weekend when they were out on the front lawn. “The little girls had their bikes out,” he said.

The mother worked for the federal government as a traveling nurse and was recently returned from Texas, where she had lived for up to two years. There was a vehicle with Texas license plates in the garage where police gathered.

The girls’ father has been notified, police said, but they declined to release his identity.

Yellow police tape crisscrossed the front yard of the home, a townhouse identical to the ones that stretch up and down the side street off routes 9 and 20. Neighbors expressed shock at the deaths.

“Oh, God. Oh, no,” said one neighbor before driving off.