UPDATE: Murder-suicide couple identified (updates throughout) . . .
A neighbor in the quiet Robinson Ranch community in Rancho Santa Margarita called 9-1-1 after hearing gunshots Wednesday afternoon.
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Orange County sheriff's deputies arrived at a million-dollar home on
Birdhollow Drive around 1:40 p.m. to find two people who had been shot
to death.
Sheriff's investigators now say Eddie Lydell Bryant, 39, gave Stacey Tomekia Bryant, 38, no warning before shooting her to death in their two-story home.
He then turned the gun on himself.
A friend inside the home at the time bolted out the door and called 9-1-1.
When deputies arrived, one body was slumped in the three-car garage and the other in a bedroom.
Stacey may have mentioned divorcing her husband before the shooting, but no court documents had been filed, reports the Orange County Register.
She was a senior vice president at First American mortgage company, a
position she rose to after starting out as a temp, and in 2005 she founded Pink Ladder, an organization that helps African-American women network in the business world, the Register reports.
There was no further description of the couple, other than they were high school sweethearts.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.