This series of photos shows the bloody aftermath of a murder-suicide in Los Angeles. A man named Phillip Lovetti shot his father-in-law before turning a shotgun on himself. A few of aspects of these images are notable. On the most visceral level the position in which Lovetti landed, below, shows what instant death+gravity does to a human body. We once read a police account about a man who shot himself and both his knees dislocated, just from the weight of his body being pulled straight down by gravity. Without muscular control the body goes where physics takes it, and you get a sense of that in these photos. Also note the pockmarked wall above the chair where Lovetti shot himself. But most interesting, to us at least, is that the cops marched Lovetti’s wife Lorena through the crime scene. Maybe she was asked to to identify the bodies or describe the incident. She’s bloodspattered, so perhaps she witnessed the entire fiasco, but maybe she got bloody handling her husband or father’s bodies, checking for pulses, for example. The data with these photos doesn’t go into detail. Nor does it explain why Lorena Lovetti is clutching a shoe in the last three shots. Whatever happened, this is a crazy series, from today, 1953. Stay jolly out there.
