John W. Dalton, Jr., who served 11 years in prison for killing his wife, was arrested Wednesday and charged with first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of his parents and his niece.
Dalton, 46, of Omaha, was pulled over in his black GMC Terrain SUV outside Tennessee after a brief police chase. He is being held without bail in Tennessee’s Madison County Jail.
John W. Dalton Sr., 70, his wife, Jean, 65, and their granddaughter, Leonna Dalton-Phillip, a 18-year-old high school senior, were killed Tuesday in the Daltons’ Omaha home.
Leonna’s younger sister, London Dalton, managed to escape and fled to a neighbor’s home about 7:30 p.m., Omaha.com reports.
“Leonna was stopping by after work to pick up her sister and get a plate of food from her grandmother,” her father Claude Phillip said Wednesday. “Her car was still running. That’s how fast all this happened.”
“I’ll never forgive him for this,” said Phillip, pictured with his daughter Leonna. “I hate him for this. He took my daughter. I know you’re not supposed to hate somebody but he took an innocent. He took his mom.”
“They loved everybody,” Phillip said of the Daltons. “They even treated my other kids like they were their own grandkids.”
In 1999, Dalton was convicted in the 1998 shooting death of his wife Shannon, 22, in the home they shared with their 3 daughters. He was sentenced to serve 20 to 30 years on manslaughter and weapons charges. But he was released from prison after serving only 11 years.
Dalton told the Judge he had been having marital difficulties.
“I wish I could go back and change that whole day around,” Dalton wrote in a letter to the judge. “I miss my wife so much.”
He also told the judge he missed his children and he wanted to be a father to them.
“My dad literally has taken everything from us,” his oldest daughter Brittiney Faison wrote on Facebook.com. “He took my mother now my grandparents and my little cousin. I don’t think I can handle this pain.”
Brittiney and her 2 sisters, ages 6, 5, and 3 at the time, were sleeping in a bedroom down the hallway and heard the shots that killed their mother in 1998.
“I know what hate feels like,” Brittiney wrote in her Facebook post on Wednesday.
Phillip said Dalton moved to a home near his parents’ house when he was released from prison.
“He lived just a couple blocks away, but I don’t think (his parents) saw him a lot,” Phillip said. “Jean would try to talk to him, but she said he was never the same after he got out of prison.”
