A New Jersey insurance executive fatally shot his wife and adult daughter before killing himself inside the family’s $1.75 million Montgomery Township mansion, county officials said.
David Grodnick, 61, killed Lora Grodnick, 62, and their daughter Sloane Grodnick, 24, then turned the gun on himself in the family’s home on Wild Azalea Lane, the New York Post reported, citing the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office.
Investigators found all three with gunshot wounds to the head. Officials ruled Lora and Sloane’s deaths homicides and David’s a suicide.
The scene was a large Skillman-area house valued at about $1.75 million. What looked like a settled suburban success story ended with three people declared dead in their own home.
Cops first went to the Wild Azalea Lane residence about 2:59 p.m. on Oct. 1 after a welfare-check call on the residents.
Officers could not locate anyone inside. That launched a search for the family’s whereabouts.
Just before 6 p.m. the next day, Oct. 2, authorities gained entry. They found the three bodies.
Lora and Sloane were in separate bedrooms. David was elsewhere in the home, still holding a gun. Medical personnel from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Somerset pronounced all three dead at the scene.
Officials did not immediately say how long the three had been dead. No motive has been released.
In a Tuesday release, the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office identified the dead and described the manners of death. It also moved to calm the public.
Somerset County prosecutors stated:
"The investigation, which remains ongoing, has yielded that the homicide deaths of both Lora and Sloane Grodnick were an isolated incident and there are no threats to the public from this tragic occurrence,"
No arrests or charges were described, which fits a case officials have already framed as murder-suicide. The probe continues.
David Grodnick worked as senior vice president and underwriting counsel for Land Services USA, a Philadelphia-based insurance firm tied to commercial real estate deals across the country.
Lora was his wife. Sloane, their 24-year-old daughter, had graduated from the Hun School in Princeton and from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She had been pursuing a master’s degree at the Rhode Island School of Design.
The family had moved to Montgomery Township from Princeton. Local reporting cited in the coverage also tied them to Bedens Brook Country Club in Skillman and TPC Jasna Polana in Princeton.
On paper, it was a life of education, club memberships, and a high-value home off a quiet lane. None of that stopped the violence inside the house.
Authorities have described the core findings in plain terms: two homicides, one suicide, one gun, one home, and no claimed danger to neighbors.
They have not publicly detailed who asked for the welfare check or why. They have not spelled out the legal basis used to enter the house on Oct. 2. They have not identified a specific weapon beyond the gun found in David’s hand.
They have not given a reason for the shootings. In a case this complete in its wreckage, that silence leaves the central why unresolved.
Montgomery Township is not a place most Americans picture when they hear of a father killing his wife and daughter. The official account says that is exactly what happened, then ended with his own death.
A prestigious address and a high-paying title did not protect this family. When a household is destroyed from the inside, status is no shield and the public is left with grief, facts, and no satisfying answer.
