A West Sacramento man is in Yolo County Jail custody, accused of killing his three young children in a crime that has stunned neighbors and emergency personnel who responded to the scene.
Robert William Hodges, 32, is scheduled to be arraigned at 1:30 p.m. Monday in Yolo Superior Court. Formal charges had not yet been filed as of late this morning.
Robert Williams Hodges. Courtesy photo
Sgt. Roger Kinney said the crime occurred Wednesday night at the Timbers Apartments on Touchstone Place, off Jefferson Boulevard and Linden Road in the city’s Southport area. It began with a 9:20 p.m. report of domestic violence.
“The call was that a male suspect was assaulting a female,” Kinney said. But as officers were en route to the apartment complex, they received additional information that the suspect had fled, and that “there was possibly three deceased children inside the apartment.”
Police and firefighters who encountered the horrific scene attempted lifesaving efforts, but the children — whose names, ages and genders have not yet been released — were pronounced dead at the scene.
Meanwhile, police issued a be-on-the-lookout bulletin for Hodges, whose Honda sedan was spotted by a CHP officer patrolling the area of Interstate 80 and Reed Avenue. Hodges yielded to a traffic stop near the West El Camino Avenue exit and was taken into custody without incident, Kinney said.
Hodges is the father of all three children, Kinney confirmed. He is being held without bail at the Yolo County Jail, where he declined an interview request from The Davis Enterprise.
Kinney said it was the mother, also in her 30s, who discovered the children’s bodies inside the second-floor apartment. They reportedly are an 11-year-old boy, a 10-year-old girl and a 7-month-old infant boy.
“I’m just assuming she’s devastated,” Kinney said. A GoFundMe has been established to offer the mother financial assistance: https://www.gofundme.com/supporting-mother-of-3-in-tragedy
As word of the tragedy spread through the Timbers Apartments, someone tied a bouquet of star-shaped helium balloons and placed three flower windmills outside the family’s apartment Thursday morning in memory of the young victims.
“Those were some real happy kids,” said a visibly shaken Betty Scott, a neighbor who heard the mother’s anguished screams when she found her children.
“I see them every morning going to school” on their scooters, said Scott, who lives in the apartment below the family. She said she never heard anything amiss coming from the unit upstairs.
“No arguing, no fighting, no kids crying, no nothing,” Scott said. “It was a good family.”
She described Hodges as “just a quiet man — he didn’t do no talking. You wouldn’t think anything was wrong.”
But something went terribly awry Wednesday night in apartment #44. Scott said the children’s mother, who is employed at a local fast-food restaurant, was choked by Hodges upon arriving home from work, initiating the domestic violence call to police.
As she waited for officers to arrive, the woman sat outside the apartment crying.
“Then she went upstairs, and that’s when she found her kids and started screaming,” said Scott, who heard the commotion from her own apartment. But she didn’t learn of the children’s deaths until about 9 p.m., when police knocked on her door.
“I’m still messed up,” said Scott, a grandmother of 12. “I was still waiting for the kids to come out this morning and go to school.”
The older children attended school at nearby Southport Elementary School, which summoned grief counselors to the campus today. A vigil was planned for 7 p.m. tonight on the school campus, 2747 Linden Road.
Yolo County Chief Deputy Coroner Gina Moya said autopsies on the three victims were scheduled to be performed today and possibly extend into Friday to determine their cause and manner of death.
Hodges does not have a criminal history in Yolo County, where online records show someone with the same name receiving citations for traffic-related offenses in 2004, 2005 and 2007.
“Nothing stood out. There’s no knowing what was going through his mind,” Kinney said.
The sergeant said his agency’s entire detectives’ unit responded to the homicide scene Wednesday night, as did some patrol officers and investigators from the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office.
Yolo County sheriff’s deputies, meanwhile, stepped in to handle calls for service during the crime-scene investigation, which ended at about 7 a.m. Thursday.
Kinney said he could not recall another case like it, either in West Sacramento or other agencies where he’s worked during his 30-year career.
“It certainly puts a lump in your throat. It rattled the cages of some of these officers, and I’m certain it did the same thing with the firefighters,” who will be offered the services of crisis counselors to process the trauma, Kinney said.
“But they had to perform and they did — not only what their training told them to do, but what their hearts told them to do, and I’m very proud of all of their efforts,” he added.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene