Dan Genz, The Examiner
2008-05-07 07:00:00.0
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FREDERICKSBURG -

A 24-year-old Falmouth man used a pistol and an assault rifle to turn a domestic dispute into a bloodbath late Monday night, killing his live-in girlfriend, two young children and himself at a Fredericksburg-area trailer park.

Aaron Poseidon Jackson shot his girlfriend with the rifle and turned the pistol on their two toddlers, shooting them in the head in their cribs, then shot himself in a quadruple homicide that has shaken Stafford County.

“There can be no motive for this kind of thing,” said Bill Kennedy, a spokesman for the Stafford County Sheriff’s Office. “We have no idea why he did it.”

Sheriff’s detectives are still digging into the details of the case, trying to piece together the events that led up to the shooting.

Reporters outnumbered residents Tuesday afternoon in the Walt LouNicol Trailer Park along U.S. Route 1, clustering outside the brown-trimmed mobile home where Jackson killed his girlfriend, Latasha Nicole Thomas, 23, and daughter, Nicole Aaron Jackson, 2, and son, Aaron Neptune Jackson, 1.

The Sheriff’s Office said Thomas feared for her safety because he had assaulted her, and she had called her family twice for help. But then she called her family saying everything was better, about 10 minutes before a neighbor called the Sheriff’s Office to report a disturbance.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of this crime,” said Sheriff Charles Jett. “There can be no explanation for this horrific and senseless tragedy.”

Ashley Price, a 24-year-old Stafford woman who said she was planning to move in with Jackson with her 3-year-old daughter in June, said she was shocked.

“He killed all of them? He killed himself?” she asked, visibly shocked. She said that in a phone call about 7 p.m. Monday, the last time she spoke with him, he had said, “I’ll probably go to jail tonight.”

She described Jackson as a hard-partying man who struggled financially and often carried two guns and a knife. She said he was using cocaine and drinking as they talked on the phone Monday.

Kennedy said he could not verify any drug use or additional details about the events leading up to the shooting.

dgenz@dcexaminer.com