Chesterfield County

3300 Meadowdale Boulevard

10:00 AM

Gunshot

Murder-suicide

Police returned gun, and husband kept his word
Thursday, Nov 13, 2008 - 12:09 AM Updated: 07:45 AM
By MARK BOWES
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Tara Owens’ crumbling marriage played out in sad, weekly dramas for her friends and co-workers at the Costco Wholesale store in Chesterfield County.

As her workmates witnessed the increasingly volatile breakup—including an eerily foreboding suicide threat by her estranged husband—they realized the couple’s four-year, up-and-down relationship was ending badly.

But they weren’t prepared for the violent conclusion.

“It’s still shocking to me to this day,“ Shelly Williams, a co-worker who grew close to Tara, said recently.

On the morning of Sept. 10, Tara’s husband, Michael Owens, fatally shot his wife outside her Chesterfield apartment within yards of their children, cloistered inside. He then killed himself on the spot with a shot to the head.

Reeling from the killings, Tara’s family and friends received another shock: The gun used in the murder-suicide had been released to Michael by Chesterfield police six days earlier.

They learned the 24-year-old Eagle Scout with a love for the outdoors had surrendered the bolt-action .30-60 hunting-style rifle to police after threatening suicide nearly three months earlier. Chesterfield police held the gun for safekeeping until Michael came to police headquarters Sept. 4 to retrieve it.

Police say they had no choice but to return the weapon, because Michael had voluntarily given it up.

“Ultimately, you’re bound by the law,“ said Chesterfield police Maj. Ben Mize. “You take those weapons [from people] hoping there’s a sufficient cooling-off period.“

Mize said people surrender weapons voluntarily to police in potentially volatile situations at least once or twice a year in Chesterfield.

“They have the right to come and get it right back,“ Mize said. Most recover their guns in days.

Steve Washer, Tara’s father, said it’s troubling that Michael was able to reclaim the gun so easily. In papers found in his daughter’s effects, he learned his son-in-law had been hospitalized—apparently voluntarily—at Tucker Pavilion, a psychiatric facility, in January.

“There needs to be a change in the law, because I think there were a lot of red flags there that were ignored,“ he said.

State police say law-enforcement officers can confiscate and hold firearms from people without their consent only when such weapons are possessed illegally, have been involved in a crime or pose an immediate threat to the life of the gun owner or someone else.

A person determined by a court to be legally incompetent or mentally incapacitated cannot possess a gun, as well as someone who has been admitted involuntarily to a mental-health facility, police say.

. . .

The June 12 suicide threat had Tara scrambling again to calm her troubled husband.

She called police after he called her at work, and officers were able to recover the rifle after Michael told them it was behind a couch at his home on Lost Forest Drive.

He was taken into custody a short time later after officers spotted him walking in the neighborhood; he had left his children, Aidan, 3, and Ayme, 1, asleep at the house, where they had spent the night.

Officers took him to talk with a county mental-health counselor, but he was not detained involuntarily for a psychological evaluation. His parents picked him up after the counseling session, police said.

“She promised him on the day he was suicidal that they would get back together, they’d go do [marriage] counseling and that they would be a family again—just to make him happy,“ said Nikki Bartlett, Tara’s former supervisor at the Costco photo lab.

“She said lots of things like that on a regular basis to try to make him feel like it’s not the end of the world.“

Her husband’s threats, though, continued.

“He told her on a regular basis that he was going to kill her, whoever was with her and himself—the first chance he got,“ Bartlett said.

But Tara, 26, apparently wasn’t fully convinced he’d do it.

“We asked her on several occasions, ‘Do you want to go to the police department? Do you want us to help you do something, go to our houses instead of your own?‘“ Bartlett recalled. “And she’d say, ‘No, I can control him,‘ and at the same time she would tell people, ‘Mike said he’s going to kill me.‘“

At C.H. Reed, where Michael worked as an air-compressor mechanic, his supervisor, Steve Rogers, said, “We never saw it coming.“

. . .

Tara met Michael, a “country boy” raised in Covington, in 2003 through a mutual friend. They married within six months after Tara became pregnant and miscarried.

Initially happy, the couple grew apart, to the point that they often sat in silence when alone together, Washer said.

Michael depended heavily on Tara to keep their household on Lost Forest Drive running, Washer said. But as their marriage worsened, Tara moved out with the children in February.

“He wasn’t able to pay the bills, and he really wasn’t capable of taking care of himself,“ Washer said.

Rogers said the Michael he knew was a hard-working, “go-to guy” eager to advance in his new career.

“I was talking to him on the phone an hour or so before the tragedy, and we were making plans for jobs for the next day—and he was excited,“ Rogers said.

But his marriage was on the rocks.

Tara, a 2000 graduate of Monacan High School, moved briefly into co-worker Williams’ apartment and then got an apartment of her own at the Regency Lake complex in the 3300 block of Meadowdale Boulevard.

“She had her kids with her and was trying to make it good when so much bad was going on,“ Williams said. “She always had a smile on her face, even when those of us closest to her knew what she was dealing with.“

Michael’s normally calm, laid-back demeanor that Williams said she remembers turned increasingly erratic as he realized his family was splitting apart.

“Tara could come into work and tell me about certain incidents that just seemed totally out of character for Mike,“ said Williams, who socialized with the couple.

In March, Washer said, the couple sat down with a mediator and drew up an agreement that, among other things, allowed each one to see other people.

Michael got upset when Tara began dating a co-worker, but his anger seemed to subside when the man left the area, Washer said. Michael also began seeing another woman who eventually moved into his house, friends said.

. . .

The end came with a jarring finality.

Vanessa Wall, Tara’s live-in nanny, had returned to Tara’s apartment when she saw the couple standing outside arguing.

Minutes later, Wall and her boyfriend, Joseph Stone, were startled by gunshots.

Stone ran downstairs to find Tara lying just outside the front door. As Stone opened the door, Michael turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger, Wall said.

Stone immediately gave first aid to Tara, “trying to keep her with him until the ambulance came,“ Wall said. But there was little he could do. She’d been shot in the chest.

Tara planned that day to begin divorce proceedings and file paperwork for custody of their children. “Later that afternoon, we were planning on going to the courthouse,“ Wall said.

The tipping point, Washer believes, came after Michael learned that Tara was preparing to move in with an old boyfriend—“her first love.“

“He had a house and a good job and a nice car; he just seemed to have his stuff together,“ Washer said.

That was the thing that put Michael “over the edge and made him realize it was over.“