Neighbors who live near River Ridge killings are shocked | Crime/Police

Neighbors of the family at the center of a shocking domestic homicide in River Ridge said they never expected to wake up to the horror that greeted them Saturday morning.

A 46-year-old man shot and killed his 40-year-old wife and his 2-year-old daughter around 4 a.m. Saturday at a home on the 1000 block of Stephen Drive. A 9-year-old girl is in critical condition with a gunshot wound, and a 13-year-old is stable with a gunshot wound to the ankle. Police entered the home and shot and killed the 46-year-old man, according to Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto.

Neighbors said there were no warning signs indicating there was trouble on the quiet residential block.

Kathy Monnerjahn, 56, was asleep at 4 a.m. when she heard what she thought was knocking on the window. She would later realize that the sounds were probably gunshots. Her dog started barking.

She got up and looked outside and saw that sheriff’s deputies had arrived, “saw more officers, saw more officers. It seemed like they had 30 police cars out here.”

Monnerjahn said she spoke to officers before dawn and asked them if she could take care of the girls at the house across the street while the scene unfolded before it was clear the children were either dead or in the hospital.

“My grandson was just riding with them in the golf cart until 7 o’clock last night,” she said. “They played on the empty lot all day yesterday.”

Although their children played together regularly, Monnerjahn did not know the parents well.

But neither she nor her husband, John, 57, ever noticed anything out of the ordinary.

“They seemed like your normal, average fun-loving family,” she said.

“The house was always decorated for Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas,” John Monnerjahn added.

James Bell, 45, followed chatter on the neighborhood’s Facebook page early this morning. “One person said they thought they heard gunshots and saw a loud one, like a shotgun,” he said.

He had never noticed anything out of the ordinary in the house down the block.

“I had seen them in passing. We talked when we were trick-or-treating,” he said. “That’s about it.”

“Everything worked well,” he added. “That’s why it’s so shocking.”

Several of the neighbors said the family often drove around the neighborhood in their golf cart together. They put up Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations outside their house.

“There was never anybody calling the police or fighting and screaming or anything like that,” John Monnerjahn said.

Tom Eaton, 67, received a text from a neighbor early Saturday morning that there had been the shooting “at the crawfish house,” a reference to the red inflatable crawfish in a Mardis Gras hat that decorated the lawn.

“It’s sinking in that there was a murder on my block,” he said, “and a pretty heinous one at that.”