Former games journalist Jason Montes, 33, shot his wife, Serena Montes, 25, and then himself, on Sunday January 11th in what police are calling an apparent murder-suicide. Strangely no one in the games media picked up the story until this morning, when Edge posted a note, identifying the timeframe as simply “on Sunday” (in fact, the incident occurred a week and a half ago).
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Concord police received reports that a man was threatening suicide around 6 p.m. Sunday, January 11th. When officers arrived, they discovered Jason Montes dead from a single gunshot wound and Serena Montes critically wounded. She died shortly thereafter at a nearby medical center.
Police believe Jason shot his wife, called a friend to say he was planning to commit suicide, then turned the gun on himself. Concord police Lt. Andrew Gartner told SFC the couple had been experiencing “significant marital difficulties,” and SFC notes Jason Montes filed for bankruptcy protection in June (though San Jose Mercury News, speaking to Serena Montes’s mother, reports the couple “seemed to have made peace with their split”).
According to Jason Montes’s Facebook page, he was a games journalist during the 1990s for Ultra Game Players, IGN, and The Official PlayStation Magazine (the Ziff Davis version). He’d since gone on to work for a web consulting firm in Redwood City, according to his father, and was hoping to land a job in film animation.