Aamer Madhani

USA TODAY

CHICAGO — Police were scrambling on Friday to find clues to what led to the grisly killings of six members of an immigrant family who were found dead in their home a day earlier.

Chief of Detective Eugene Roy said there were no signs of forced entry into the brick bungalow home that had been transformed into what one officer described as a "bloody mess."

All six people, four adults and two children, were ruled homicide victims, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office. Five died from "sharp force" or "blunt force" injuries and the sixth from gunshot wounds.

One of the first officers to arrive at the home on the city's Southwest Side found a gruesome crime scene, according to a recording of police radio traffic of the incident.

"Send a sarge over here," the officer tells the dispatcher. "This is a bloody mess."

The same officer reported a few seconds later that it appeared one of the victims, an older woman, had been stabbed multiple times.

"This is a complex investigation," Roy said. "We are working meticulously."

Police discovered the bodies shortly after 1 p.m. Thursday after receiving a phone call from a concerned co-worker that someone who lived in the house had not shown up for work for two days. Police went to the house to conduct a well-being check and officers discovered the bodies of four adults and two children, ages 10 and 13, lying throughout the house. (Police originally said the dead were five adults and one child.)

Six people lived in the home — a couple, their adult son, their daughter and the daughter’s two children. Family of the victims identified the dead as Rosa Hernandez and Noe Martinez, in their 60s; their adult son Noe Martinez Jr.; Herminia Martinez, and her two sons, Alexis and Leonardo, the Chicago Tribune reported.

The medical examiner's office, which did not provide names of the victims, said the older woman and younger adult male were killed by multiple sharp and blunt force injuries. The older man and two children were killed by sharp force injuries. And the younger adult woman died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Roy told reporters earlier in the day that there had been no signs of gunfire in the home. Anthony Guglielmi, a police department spokesman, said that investigators did not recover bullet casings or any other evidence that made it readily apparent that one of the women suffered gunshot wounds.

Investigators were reviewing the medical examiner's findings on Friday evening and were conducting interviews to get a better understanding of the victims' backgrounds. Although the medical examiner ruled all the deaths homicides, investigators had not ruled anything out — including the possibility that the incident may have been a murder-suicide, Guglielmi said.

The medical examiner's office declined to offer further comment citing the ongoing investigation.

Noemi Martinez, 29, a relative of the victims, said the family was originally from the Mexican state of Guanajuato and had lived in Chicago for about a decade.

“They were a normal family. Everything was fine,” Martinez, who lives in Dallas, told the Associated Press.

Chicago records 51 homicides in January, highest toll since 2000

Roy said the door to the house was locked when officers arrived on the scene, and the home had not been ransacked nor were the victims bound.

The incident comes after the nation's third largest city recorded 51 homicides in January, the highest toll for the month since at least 2000. Gang conflicts and retaliatory violence drove the surge in homicides, police said.

In addition to the jump in killings, the police department said it recorded 241 shooting incidents in January, more than double the 119 incidents recorded last January.

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