Two teenagers, aged 15 and 16, are in custody after allegedly executing five members of the same family across three separate locations in East St. Louis on Sunday. At least one of the suspects was related to at least one of the victims. Let that sink in for a second.
What Actually Happened
Illinois state police director Brendan Kelly confirmed at a Sunday press conference that the two teens were apprehended at Holten State Park, a recreation area east of the city, after what authorities are calling a "targeted mass shooting." As of Sunday evening, neither suspect had been formally charged with a crime.
The five victims have been identified by state police as Cherie L May, 49; Patricia A May, 74; Devin D May, 24; Quentin L Thompson, 21; and Shania W Thompson, 25. Two additional family members were wounded and transported to a hospital in neighboring St. Louis, Missouri. No bystanders were hurt.
Kelly said the shootings unfolded across three locations in East St. Louis. He declined to comment on how teenagers got their hands on guns. He also declined to say much more about the family connection between at least one suspect and at least one victim, which is either because the investigation is ongoing or because there is simply no way to say that out loud without the room going completely silent.
A Crime That Has a Name and Keeps Happening
What happened in East St. Louis fits the definition of a family annihilation, a category of mass murder that has been studied and named since the 1980s. As The Guardian reports, the pattern typically involves a male armed with a gun killing multiple close family members. Five dead, spanning three generations of what appears to be the May and Thompson families, across three locations. That is not chaos. That is a plan.
American communities have a long habit of treating these events as isolated tragedies, freak occurrences that fall outside any pattern worth addressing. A 2023 investigation by the Indianapolis Star blew a hole in that framing, finding that family annihilations were occurring across the United States every five days on average. Every. Five. Days. And yet there is no national strategy. No federal framework. No coordinated response of any kind.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-partisan tracking organization, the East St. Louis killings are at least the 12th mass murder reported in the US so far in 2026. At least seven of those twelve fit the definition of a family annihilation. As of Monday morning, there have been more than 240 mass shootings in the United States this year alone.
The Missouri Problem That Nobody in Missouri Wants to Discuss
Here is the part of the story that is very awkward for a certain type of politician. Illinois, as The Guardian points out, has some of the strictest state-level gun laws in the country. Gun buyers are required to carry a firearm identification card. The state has licensing requirements. It takes the whole thing at least somewhat seriously.
East St. Louis, however, sits directly on the border with Missouri. And Missouri is about as far in the opposite direction as you can legally travel. Missouri requires no permits to buy or carry firearms. It has no licensing system. It does not regulate the transfer or storage of private firearms. And critically, Missouri does not criminalize minors possessing handguns, shotguns, or rifles. Selling those firearms to minors without parental consent is illegal, but simply having one as a teenager is not.
So when Kelly declined to comment on how two teenagers obtained firearms, the subtext was sitting right there on the map. A strict-gun-law state sharing a border with a state that treats gun ownership like a constitutional free-for-all is not a strict-gun-law state in any meaningful practical sense. It is a state with a leaky bucket.
Congress Has Entered the Chat and Done Nothing
America's mass shooting numbers have, for years, produced calls from lawmakers and advocates for stronger federal gun control. Congress has not delivered. The gun control measures passed after Uvalde in 2022 were real but incremental, and the political will to go further evaporated before the bodies were cold.
What we are left with is a patchwork of state laws that the most determined bad actors, including apparently a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old, route around without much difficulty. Illinois can pass whatever it wants. As long as Missouri exists fourteen minutes away with no meaningful restrictions, the math does not change.
The Dingo Take
Five people are dead. Three generations of a family, killed across three locations, allegedly by two teenagers, one of whom may have known the victims personally. The youngest suspect is fifteen years old. Fifteen. Whatever drove this, whoever pulled what trigger, the machinery that made it possible is the same machinery that has been humming along in the background of American life for decades now, occasionally acknowledged, never seriously dismantled.
Every five days, on average, somewhere in this country, someone decides to wipe out their own family. That is not a statistic about random violence. That is a statistic about something broken at a very specific level, in very specific households, and the United States has collectively decided that investigating why that keeps happening and doing something about it is less important than making sure nobody has to fill out extra paperwork to buy a rifle.
Two teenagers are sitting in custody tonight without formal charges. Five people named May and Thompson are not going home. And somewhere in Washington, the people with the actual authority to build a national response to this specific, documented, recurring category of mass murder are doing precisely nothing about it. We know this because they have been doing nothing about it for as long as we have been keeping score.
