Two women — one of whom had been reported missing — were found slain Thursday afternoon inside an East Hills home that Pittsburgh police continued to examine late into the night.
Officials have not said how Valorie Crumpton, 72, and her granddaughter Tionna Banks, 19, died, though some did hint that the crime scene — Ms. Crumpton’s house on Karl Street — was more complex than most.
“Inside that house is not a pleasant setting right now,” said Sonya Toler, Pittsburgh public safety spokeswoman, Thursday afternoon. “Right now, all I can tell you is that there was evidence of blood away from the bodies.”
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Allegheny County medical examiner Karl Williams, who typically delegates the crime scene processing to his staff, said he made a preliminary visit to the home Thursday afternoon.
“The longer they’re out there, the more complex it is,” he said, declining to say how the women had died before autopsies could be completed. Those exams are scheduled for today. Police have described the deaths as homicides.
Local real estate records show Ms. Crumpton bought the green, single-family house in 1984, and court records indicate that Ms. Banks had lived there in recent months, though she was most recently listed as living in the Hill District.
Ms. Toler said a worker at a social service agency contacted police Tuesday after Ms. Banks missed an appointment at an assigned time that day. A detective in the bureau’s missing-persons unit asked officers in the city’s Zone 5 station to look for her at Ms. Crumpton’s house Thursday afternoon.
When officers arrived shortly before 1 p.m. and knocked on the door, no one answered. “They smelled an odd odor that caused them concern,” Ms. Toler said. “They heard music coming from the inside of the house as well. With those two things going on, they decided that that was enough to force entry into the home.”
Inside, she said, officers found the two women, who appeared to be dead.
They heard the volume grow louder on the music and “immediately backed out thinking that there may have been somebody else inside of the structure and they called for SWAT,” Ms. Toler said.
The SWAT team, aided by a robot, checked the house and found that no one else was inside, she said,
Relatives and neighbors gathered outside the house, crying and occasionally yelling while detectives examined the scene.
Some neighbors said they had heard gunshots at various times the night before, but didn’t call police because the sound is common in their neighborhood and they weren’t entirely sure where it was coming from.
Robert Lumsden, 62, who lives nearby, said he was watching TV when he heard four or five shots about 9:30 p.m. Another neighbor, Renee Johnson, 60, said she heard about a half-dozen shots around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday and they seemed to come from the same direction as the Crumpton house.
Police have not released any information about a motive or suspects in the shootings. Court records show both women had previously obtained protection-from-abuse orders against different people.
Ms. Johnson said she had recently seen Ms. Crumpton with Ms. Banks’ child, though she did not recall exactly when. The whereabouts of the child could not be determined Thursday.
She knew Ms. Crumpton as “Miss Valorie” and described her as a devoted grandmother and great-grandmother.
“Whatever difficulties the children had, she would seek whatever she could,” Ms. Johnson said. “She was just a wonderful lady. You would hear her coming from the time she got off the bus because she would sing.”
