Eideard

Then he shot himself.

A Whitehall man found dead along with his wife and two children Wednesday already had shot his family when neighbors saw him shoveling his driveway that morning, police said.

“I saw him around 11 a.m. and he seemed fine,” neighbor Stephanie Grunkemeyer, 37, said. “I’m shocked. They’re just your normal family. We didn’t hear anything until the police arrived…”

Forty minutes after neighbors say they saw Meeks clearing snow, he sent a three-paragraph e-mail to his father-in-law, Jim Dallas, 73, of Westerville.

“In the e-mail he didn’t come out and say what he was going to do,” Brown said. “But the information would lead the reader to believe that something was going to happen in the home or had happened.”

Dallas didn’t open the e-mail until shortly before 2 p.m., at which point he called the police and asked them to check on the well-being of the family, Brown said.

Officers found Meeks and his wife dead on the floor of the master bedroom in their ranch-style home at 918 Beechwood Rd. The children, who were home from Etna Road Elementary for a snow day, were found dead in their beds.

“We would like to believe that the children were asleep,” Brown said. “But we’ll really never know.”

Sad enough, alienated enough to have been written by Camus. The saddest kind of suicide is always the demented fool who decides he’s “taking his family with him” – to nowhere.