Two people have been found dead in a Wisconsin home and a third “person of interest” has been jailed on unrelated charges, but police have released little other information about the case that began unfolding Friday morning.
The Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department said it conducted a welfare check on a family at the home shortly before 10 a.m. on Friday in the Village of Waukesah and found one person dead. At the time, they said, the location of the other family members was unknown.
On Saturday, the sheriff’s department announced two people had been found dead inside the home and that “a person of interest is currently in custody on separate charges.”
And that was the extent of the official information provided.
But a Massachusetts woman told WTMJ that the person found dead on Friday was her son, 51-year-old Donald Mayer, and that he lived at the home with his wife and stepson. Judith Mayer told the station she hadn’t heard from the family in nearly two weeks.
“I thought they were angry with me,” Mayer said. “This was all different and never done before and I was confused and upset, and I didn’t know what to do.”
But then, she got a phone call from a school staffer asking if she knew why the stepson hadn’t been in school. Both she and the school then contacted Waukesha County authorities.
“I gave them all the codes to house, and it went from there,” she explained.
Although officials haven’t confirmed it, Mayer said investigators told her that her son, his wife Tatiana, and the family dog were found dead and that the stepson was missing, according to WITI.
It’s not clear if the stepson is the “person of interest” who is in custody, but the sheriff’s department has not repeated its initial statement that anyone is missing.
Neighbors, meanwhile, told WTMJ that the family largely kept to themselves but they hadn’t seen them in a few weeks and assumed they were on vacation.
The sheriff’s department did not respond to any requests for further information, and Judith Mayer said she’d been told an autopsy was scheduled for Monday.
