A US police officer in Utah,
killed his wife, their two children, his mother-in-law and then himself after
receiving text messages from his wife hours earlier threatening to leave him.
According to an AP report, the
wife wanted to leave and take their kids because she accused him of raping her,
according to new documents.
A Spanish Fork Police report
shows Joshua Boren and his wife exchanged heated texts the night and morning
before the January killings.
In them, Kelly Boren confronted
her husband about raping her and told him their marriage was over, The Deseret
News reported . The couple already had been separated for some time.
Joshua Boren's therapist told
authorities that Boren drugged his wife and videotaped himself sexually
assaulting her on more than one occasion.
Kelly Boren learned of the
assaults when she discovered the tapes in 2013, said Spanish Fork Police Lt.
Matt Johnson. She told a few friends, but she did not report the assaults to
police because she didn't want to ruin her husband's law enforcement career,
the report says.
The night before she was
killed, Kelly Boren brought up the alleged sexual assault again, texting the
word "rape" to her husband four times, the documents show. "I
hate my life because (of) you," she texted. "You killed a part of
me."
She wrote in another text:
"I don't want to live in fear and hate and anger."
The next morning, Kelly Boren
told her husband she would take the kids, prompting Joshua Boren to reply by
text: "Don't involve the kids, they are innocent."
The police report says Joshua
Boren was sexually abused as a child, struggled with drug addiction as a young
man and pornography addiction throughout his life, and had a deep-rooted hatred
for his mother.
After his father committed
suicide when he was 5, Joshua Boren's mother began using drugs and seeing
several men, the report states. One of those men allegedly abused Joshua Boren,
and he blamed his mother for not protecting him, his sister told police.
The therapist told police Boren
was like a "3-year-old boy stuck in a big man's body."
"Josh was a very troubled
individual that felt like he was about to lose his wife and children,"
police wrote in the report.
Joshua Boren had worked for the
Lindon Police Department for only three months when the murder-suicide
occurred. Before that, he was a Utah County sheriff's deputy for seven years,
Johnson said.
He used the service weapon he
was given for his duties as a Lindon police officer when he killed his family
members and himself, authorities said. Toxicology reports from the autopsy show
he had no drugs or alcohol in his system.
Police said the state medical
examiner confirmed what investigators believed: Joshua Boren shot his wife,
32-year-old Kelly Boren; his 55-year-old mother-in-law, Marie King; and his two
children, 7-year-old Joshua "Jaden" and 5-year-old Haley, before
killing himself.
The shooting happened at the
family's home in Spanish Fork, a city of about 37,000 located 50 miles south of
Salt Lake City. The events stunned the community, as well as friends and
family, said Johnson, who added investigators didn't find anybody who suspected
Joshua Boren was capable of such an act.
Though Joshua Boren wasn't
living at the house, friends and family said he still came every morning to get
the kids ready for school and preschool, Johnson said. He also picked them up
every afternoon.
"He was praised as being
an excellent father," Johnson said.
