Landlord ‘shot and burned bodies of family including two kids in backyard pit’
A landlord allegedly shot dead a family of four including two young children and burned their remains in a backyard pit after they did not pay rent.
Cops responded to the Florida home of Rory Atwood, 25, after a caller said Atwood asked his brother to help him with burning trash and ‘observed a puddle of blood and could see adult and child bodies over the video phone call’, stated a Pasco County complaint affidavit.
Arriving sheriff’s deputies last Thursday ‘observed a fire put in the backyard of the property which was actively smoldering and smoking’, according to the affidavit obtained by Fox News.
Atwood told deputies that his roommates – Rain Mancini, 26; Phillip Zilliot II, 25; and their children Karma Zilliot, 6; and Phillip Zilliot – had left his property in Hudson on Wednesday evening.
The landlord later admitted to deputies that he kicked the family out of his home on June 1 over unpaid rent and that they returned ‘unexpectedly’ on Wednesday evening.
Atwood said the parents entered with knives to his bedroom where he was with his four-year-old daughter. Atwood said he and Phillip Zilliot II began fighting and that Mancini poked his daughter’s neck using the knife, the affidavit stated.
According to the landlord, Phillip Zilliot II took out a gun and amid a struggle, Mancini was shot several times. Atwood said he pointed the gun at Phillip Zilliot II and fatally shot him.
Atwood ‘did not disclose’ how the couple’s two kids died but claimed that their parents killed them.
The landlord is accused of dragging the deceased family members and a blood-stained couch to the fire pit to burn.
A cadaver dog sniffing the fire pit took an item from the pit with its mouth, which ‘appeared to be a small skeletal remains’, stated the affidavit.
Atwood ‘admitted to involvement in the death of both adult victims, and he admitted to knowledge that both juveniles were also burned in the same fire pit,’ the affidavit read.
The landlord claimed self-defense, but investigators believe the murders were premediated and that he tried to conceal them by destroying evidence.
Atwood has been charged with first-degree murder and possibly faces other charges amid the ongoing investigation. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bond, court records showed.
As of Wednesday, the human remains had not been officially identified.
The family of four’s deaths come nearly nine months after a Brooklyn landlord allegedly set an apartment on fire because a family stopped paying rent, and the parents tossed four of their six children out a window to save their lives.
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