That’s how Judy Law of Oxford, North Carolina, described her neighbors Jerome Faulkner, 73, and his wife, Dora, 62. The couple were found dead Thursday by West Virginia authorities, their bodies hidden under a mattress in a red Chevrolet truck after two police officers were shot and wounded at the scene.
“They kept to themselves, but when someone needed them, they were there,” Law said of the Faulkners. “I can’t even begin to understand why something like this happened.”
The first sign of something amiss came Thursday morning, when Law woke to sirens and fire trucks congregating about 500 feet up the road at the Faulkners’ home in Oxford.
Granville County Fire Marshal Doug Logan said the blaze was set intentionally, destroying the house. Video showed that it left little more than the home’s front steps, its foundation and some scorched framing.
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Jerome Faulkner was chief of the Cornwall Volunteer Fire Department in Oxford before retiring. One of his two sons, with the Raleigh Fire Department, followed him into the field, according to Logan.
Law, for one, is having trouble understanding how something so bad could happen to such good people.
“It’s senseless,” she said.
CNN’s Kevin Conlon, Dave Alsup and Mayra Cuevas contributed to this report.
