What is going on?
Our nice, quiet community has been rocked by senseless crimes recently, it seems.
Is it the heat?
Global warming?
Police are investigating an apparent murder-suicide in the Comal Farms manufactured home neighborhood off Interstate 35.
The bodies of Earl Lynn Tomerlin, 55, and a second person — whom police refused to name pending notification of kin — were found late Wednesday inside Tomerlin’s home in the 100 block of Marble Drive. County appraisal district records indicate Tomerlin co-owns the house with his wife, Philippines-born Juiceline “Joy” Tomerlin, who is reportedly in her late 20s.
Friends of Joy Tomerlin say she is dead, and that police found her body Wednesday alongside her husband’s. Lynde Pendleton, also a native of the Philippines, says she and Tomerlin spoke daily and that a mutual friend grew worried when the couple didn’t answer their door Wednesday evening. New Braunfels Police Sgt. Mike Penshorn confirmed Thursday that a friend of the couple had called authorities, but would not confirm the unnamed victim’s gender or relationship to Tomerlin, nor would he say if anyone else was in the house when police arrived.
Police found the bodies after being called to check on the home’s occupants, he said, and Earl Tomerlin and the second victim were later pronounced dead by Justice of the Peace Diana Guerrero. Penshorn said a gun was recovered at the scene, but wouldn’t say if it was registered to anyone in the house.
“It’s terrible,” said Pendleton, adding that she’d called Joy Tomerlin’s family in the Philippines to tell them the woman had died. “I’m shocked.”Tomerlin worked two jobs to send money to her ailing father in the Philippines, Pendleton said. The petite woman had many friends, she said, and she was known to everyone as “Little Joy.” Wednesday’s incident is the fourth homicide in New Braunfels since September, and the second since January in the Comal Farms subdivision.
Deborah Goodine Yarborough was charged in January with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after police found the body of her boyfriend, Frederick Dwulet, in their residence on the 200 block of Indian Grass Drive. “In the last six months or so, it’s not been the quiet neighborhood it (once) was,” Comal Farms resident Kenneth Watson said Thursday. “It’s just been out of whack.”
