MIAMI — A man, a woman and two small children were found shot to death early Friday on a lonely stretch of highway in St. Lucie County, about 120 miles north of here.
The woman had tried to shield the boy and girl, thought to be 4 and 6, by cradling them under her arms, officials said. But bullets riddled all four bodies, which were found in the grass alongside the road.
Sheriff Ken J. Mascara of St. Lucie County said a southbound driver on Florida's Turnpike had spotted the bodies and alerted state troopers just before 8 a.m. The victims had probably been traveling with their killer in a van or SUV that left tracks along the roadside, Mascara said.
"This is definitely not a murder-suicide," he told reporters. "This is a murder that we are pulling out all stops to find out who committed this hideous crime."
The adults carried identification, but pending notification of their relatives, officials said only that the man was 29 and the woman was 25, and that both were Hispanic. At a news conference on Friday evening, Mascara said the victims were Florida residents, The Associated Press reported.
Mascara said officials had found no footprints but were searching the area and finding bullet fragments and casings. There is a surveillance camera on a pole nearby, he said, but it is used only after traffic accidents and was off Thursday night.
The victims were either kneeling or lying down when they were killed, Mascara said, and had not tried to flee or fight back. He would not say whether they had been robbed.
"The woman," he said, "in a defensive posture, had both of the children surrounded underneath her arms in an effort that we can assume was to protect them from the gunfire."
The crime took place on a stretch of the turnpike near the St. James Golf Club in Port St. Lucie, a city of sprawling subdivisions about halfway between Miami and Orlando. But Mascara said he thought that the victims were from somewhere else and that their killers were long gone.
Mascara said it was one of the grisliest crime scenes he had encountered.