In October 2019 a West Philadelphia home on Walton Avenue became the scene of a multiple homicide. Leslie Holmes, 56, was found dead along with his wife Janet Woodson, 51, and their two sons, 18-year-old Sy-eed Woodson and 7-year-old Leslie Woodson-Holmes, after coworkers requested a welfare check when the couple failed to report for work at a local nursing home.

Police entered the second-floor residence through a window and found Maurice Louis, 29, Woodson’s son and Holmes’s stepson, naked in a room drinking from a bottle with a rifle on the floor. Louis confessed at the scene to killing the four family members, who were located in different parts of the house and had suffered catastrophic gunshot wounds to the head. Investigators said the shotgun used had been purchased the day before the killings.

Family reports and later court records describe Louis’s history of mental illness, including diagnoses of depression and schizophrenia and an involuntary commitment in 2018. Louis was arrested and charged with four counts of criminal homicide and later pleaded guilty to four counts of third-degree murder. The victims’ estates sued Horizon Health Management and Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, alleging failures to file paperwork after the 2018 commitment that would have barred the shotgun purchase; a jury later found Horizon liable and awarded over $18 million in damages.

Did anyone in the neighborhood see or hear anything unusual at the Walton Avenue house in October 2019?