Police: Couple dead in murder-suicide

Jerusalem couple's two young children discover their parents' bodies.

By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
handgun 88 (photo credit: )
handgun 88
(photo credit: )
A Jerusalem man shot and killed his wife while she was sleeping in bed Sunday and then killed himself, police said. The bodies of the couple were discovered in the bedroom of their apartment in the city's Ramat Danya neighborhood by their nine-year-old son. The boy managed to open their locked bedroom door after they failed to wake him or his seven-year old sister up for school Sunday morning, only to find his parents, David and Zita Turgeman, shot dead. He then summoned police and an ambulance. Paramedics pronounced the couple dead on the scene. "The kids understood what had happened, that their parents were dead," said Magen David Adom paramedic Yaniv Oved. The 35-year-old woman was lying on the bed, and the 41-year-old husband was slouched on the floor near the bed, police said. The gun used in the attack was found near the bodies. The husband left a note in the apartment in which he said he had decided to kill his wife and then take his own life due to a marital crisis, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said. Officials said that the man suspected that his wife was having an affair. According to a preliminary police investigation, the couple did not have any history of family violence, but acquaintances said that their marriage had recently broken down and the two were undergoing counseling. Neighbors said they had not noticed anything unusual in the morning. "We didn't hear or see anything," said building resident Micha Ashkenazi. The man, who worked with computers, did not have a license to carry a gun and had borrowed the weapon from a family member several days ago saying he needed it for a trip to the West Bank for work, police said. Police plan to carry out an autopsy on the bodies. Zita Turgeman immigrated to Israel from Hungary. She worked at the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, and was honored by the Hungarian Government last year together with three other Yad Vashem employees for promoting Holocaust education and remembrance in Hungary. "She was a very special woman, highly talented, who exhibited both emotional and cognitive intelligence," said Chava Baruch, a friend and coworker, who heads the Hungarian Desk at Yad Vashem's International School. Baruch said that museum officials were aware that Turgeman was undergoing a marital crisis, but that they had hoped that it would pass. Turgeman returned to Hungary with her two children this month for a vacation, and was due back at work on Sunday.