Border Police officer says he killed wife in Bat Yam
“I just murdered my wife” veteran Border Patrol officer tells police; Police discover body of another woman in Bat Yam.
By BEN HARTMANPolice at Bat Yam shooting scene(photo credit: Ben Hartman)
A veteran Border Police officer shot his ex-wife to death in their Bat Yam apartment on Monday morning before calling police and telling them, “I just killed my wife.”The shooting took place around 11:30 a.m. in the couple’s apartment on Balfour Street, the central thoroughfare of the city.Officers arrested the 48-yearold border policeman and called paramedics, who arrived on the scene to pronounce the woman dead.Police found the couple’s 20- year-old son, who is serving in the IDF, inside the apartment and took him in for questioning as well. They would not say if he is suspected of being involved in the murder.In the meantime, the Police Investigative Unit of the Justice Ministry has been tasked with investigating the murder.Magen David Adom spokesman Zaki Heller said that when paramedics arrived at the apartment, they found the woman with a “high number” of bullet wounds in her upper body and lacking a pulse. There was little that paramedics could do to help the woman, he said. They pronounced her dead at the scene.The murder suspect’s sister was at the scene of the crime on Monday, and described her brother and his wife as a normal couple who, she said, never fought. She said that her brother did not say he was going through any type of distress, and that everything seemed normal when she saw the couple this past Friday.The couple immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia in 1984, the sister said. She added that the couple got a divorce just six months before the shooting, but continued to live together in the same apartment.A neighbor, Daniel Uziel, said he never heard any fighting from the couple, though he admitted that he only knew them “on a hello-goodbye basis.” He added that when he last saw the husband the day earlier, “there seemed to be something strange about him, he seemed a bit withdrawn, but nothing really out off the ordinary.”Only about a couple hundred meters away from the scene of the murder, police found a second body, that of a 31-year-old woman.
The woman’s boyfriend called police to report finding her dead in their bedroom, only an hour after the murder on Balfour Street was reported. Police said the woman and her boyfriend were known to be heavy drinkers and it is unclear if the death was a murder or just a result of years of heavy drinking.They added that the woman had some bruises on her stomach. They detained her boyfriend, who lived with her, for questioning.Forensic investigators took her body to the L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir, where they will seek to determine the cause of death.
