13-Year-Old: 'She Got Shot In The Head'

LAKELAND, Fla. -- He had shot his wife. He had shot his 8-year-old and 4-month-old boys. All were dying or already dead at their south Lakeland home.

But his 13-year-old son was still alive.

And running.

So Troy Bellar ran after him, slowed by the rifle he was carrying. He had a scope on his .308 caliber rifle, and he aimed at his fleeing teenage son.

He fired once, several times. Each time he missed.

Nathaniel Bellar survived, the only one of the Bellar family who did. Shortly after shooting at Nathaniel, Troy Bellar fatally shot himself in his front yard Sunday evening with the same rifle he had used to kill his wife, Wendy, their 4-month-old son, Zachary, and their 8-year-old son, Ryan.

“We’ll always ask ourselves why, and the family members will always ask themselves why,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said. “None of us will ever get that answer. It absolutely makes your blood boil to think a man could do that to his wife and children.”

Nathaniel ran to a neighbor’s home Sunday night after the shooting, investigators say.

The neighbor called 911. An operator asked whether the boy’s stepmother was still alive.

“She got shot in the head,” Nathan Bellar said.

The teen told deputies that about 9:30 p.m. Sunday there were some words exchanged in the home, but nothing particularly loud or ominous, Judd said.

Then as Wendy Rene Bellar prepared to leave with the children after the argument, the shooting began. Wendy and the two young children were killed on the front porch.

One 911 caller told the operator she had heard about 10 gunshots.

Deputies don’t believe a suicide note was left at the scene.

Troy Bellar and Wendy had had some domestic problems in the past, but the couple seemed to have worked things out, Troy’s father said Monday.

Jim Bellar said he last spoke to his son about 8 p.m. last night. Everything seemed normal.

Jim Bellar said he is not certain what started the chain of events. Asked what the past few hours have been like for him and his relatives he said, “You’d only know if you’d lost your entire family.”

The Bellars had been married 10 years. Troy Bellar and his former wife, who also was named Wendy, were divorced in February 1998 after nearly four years of marriage. His first wife is Nathan Bellar’s mother, court records show.

Nathan will be placed with family members, Polk County sheriff’s office spokesman Scott Wilder said.

Nathan attends Mulberry Middle School. Ryan attended Southwest Elementary School. Grief counselors will be on hand today at the elementary school, according to the Polk school district.

“He was a very special, sweet boy; a little first-grader here that everybody loves,” Southwest Elementary Principal Ellen Andersen said. “We’re just all very, very saddened.”

Wendy Bellar last logged on to her MySpace page Thursday. She listed her mood as “eccentric.”

Bellar’s listed interests include: “Learning everything. Listening to and playing music. Reading and writing literature (especially poetry, prose). Everything about math and its perfection. Oh, yeah, and I hate sports.”

She said her son Ryan’s autism “gives him little language.” She said she graduated from Pine Ridge High School in Deltona in 1996, attended Polk Community College in Winter Haven for several years and had been attending the University of South Florida, where she was majoring in English.

She wrote on her page that she would like to meet “Sylvia Plath, Natalie Merchant, Tracy Chapman, Mozart, Dali and God.”

Troy Bellar had been arrested twice in Polk County. He was charged with aggravated assault in 1994 and with driving under the influence in 1999.

Deputies were called to the Bellars’ home March 14 to investigate a domestic incident. Troy Bellar told investigators Wendy “beat on him some” and left with a knife, according to the state attorney’s office. Troy Bellar, who wasn’t injured, told deputies his wife appeared to have been suffering from postpartum depression and was trying to gain his attention “through various actions.”

Deputies said that when they spoke with Wendy Bellar, she couldn’t explain what happened but said she loved her children and was a good mother. She told deputies she was embarrassed by her actions.

Wendy Bellar was charged with battery-domestic violence, Wilder said. A pretrial conference had been scheduled for this Thursday.

Several similar high-profile cases in recent months have been tied to families’ economic woes. Deputies said they aren’t aware of whether that is the case with the Bellars.

An analysis by the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., found an average of nine or 10 murder-suicides a week across the country. But familicides — in which both parents and all their children are killed — generally happen only two or three times every six months, said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the center, a nonprofit gun-control advocacy group. She said there has been a clear rash of such killings in recent months.

They can be tied to the nation’s economic woes, said Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

He describes familicides as “canaries in a mineshaft” — sensational cases that herald an uptick in more common forms of domestic violence.

“You can only speculate over whether the economy is going to affect the broad swath of abuse of children and abuse of women,” he said. “But the warning sign is when these familicide cases begin to cluster. In the past few months, they have begun to pop off across the country.”

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