Erie Coroner Names the Victims of the Perry Street Mass Shooting: A Family, a Sister, and a Friend Who Came to Help

The short version: Erie County Coroner Lyell Cook on Monday identified the six adult victims of Friday's mass shooting at a home on Perry Street in Erie — a husband and wife, three of their children, the wife's sister and a family friend — along with the man police say shot them all before taking his own life. The identifications were first reported by the Erie Times-News, and USA TODAY confirmed them in its national coverage on Monday. Two young children, ages 5 and 22 months, were also killed; officials are not permitted to release their names because they are minors. In total, eight people were murdered, and a ninth victim, an unborn child, died with her mother.

What happened on Perry Street

The shooting happened late Friday afternoon, October 9, at and around a residence at 722 Perry Street on Erie's east side. According to Erie Police Chief Rick Lorah, the city's ShotSpotter system and multiple 911 calls alerted officers at about 4:53 p.m., and police arrived in under three minutes. By then, investigators say, every shot had already been fired.

Reviewing surveillance video from a neighboring home, police determined that the gunman shot six people inside the house. Two women — described as arriving at the home in a state of distress — then came to the house, and the gunman came outside and shot them both before going back inside and shooting himself. Officers found the two women outside the residence when they arrived.

The victims

Cook identified the suspect as Matthew Stone Sr., 45, and ruled his death a suicide. The other deaths were ruled homicides. The adult victims are Michelle Stone, 44, the suspect's wife; their children Matthew Stone Jr., 21, Jonathan Stone, 19, and Angelina Stone, 24; Lora Roberts, 37, Michelle Stone's sister; and Twila Tanner, 51, a family friend.

Angelina Stone was pregnant — the coroner described her as full term — and her two children, the 5-year-old boy and the 22-month-old girl, were also killed. All of the Stone family members and the two children lived at the Perry Street home; Tanner and Roberts lived elsewhere in the city. All but Roberts were pronounced dead at the scene beginning around 9:45 p.m. Friday, after the coroner's office completed its work there. Roberts was taken to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 5:39 p.m. Friday. No autopsies were performed.

Roberts had served for about two years on the board of Community of Caring, an Erie shelter organization, and colleagues remembered her this week as someone who showed up for other families in crisis — including, by every account, on Friday, when she went to the Perry Street home to help her niece.

A motive is still unknown

Police are treating the shooting as a domestic situation: nearly all of the victims were related to the suspect and lived in the same home. But Chief Lorah said investigators have not determined a motive, and detectives plan to keep interviewing relatives and working through the evidence collected at the house. The coroner's office has released the victims to funeral homes.

For Erie, the work now is the slow kind. A family that filled a house on Perry Street — parents, grown children, a toddler, a kindergartner, and a baby who was about to be born — is being buried, and two more families, the Robertses and the Tanners, are burying women who came to help. Vigils and fundraisers are being organized across the city, and the investigation continues in the background. Police have asked anyone with information about the events leading up to Friday afternoon to contact the Erie Bureau of Police.

A city showing up

Over the weekend, neighbors and relatives gathered near the Perry Street home to grieve in public what is almost impossible to absorb in private. Among those who spoke was Julius Windham, the father of Angelina Stone's 22-month-old daughter, who described Angelina to WJET/WFXP as a star in his life. Windham lost, in a single afternoon, his daughter, the mother of his child, and the baby who was on the way.

At Community of Caring, the Erie shelter organization where Lora Roberts served on the board, executive director Chris Tombaugh remembered a colleague who had spent years helping Erie's most vulnerable residents — and who, in July, had posted publicly about her frustration with the shootings that kept scarring the city, writing that Erie needed to do better. Roberts went to Perry Street on Friday because her niece needed help. Tanner, her friend, went with her for support. Neither came home.

Stories like this one resist a clean ending, and investigators are careful to say what they do not know: why Friday, why then, and whether anything in the hours before 4:53 p.m. pointed to what was coming. What is known is the arithmetic — nine dead, one unborn child, three generations of one family — and a neighborhood on Erie's east side that will measure time from this weekend for a long while.