The husband of a woman who died in a double shooting Wednesday said it might have been one of his own guns that was used in the incident, which also left the couple’s “surrogate son” in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the chest.
Tim Tabor, who lives a few doors down from the Brandywine Hundred home where his wife died – and which was the scene of a similar crime in 2011 – said police asked him to describe a rifle missing from his gun collection, specifically whether its stock was wooden, which it is.
Publicly, police on Thursday released no new details in the shooting, and an autopsy had not been completed on the 50-year-old victim, presumed but not officially identified to be Suzette Tabor.
Meanwhile, Tabor is left to wonder whether his wife of 33 years died in a murder-suicide or a suicide pact – and whether the shooter was she or 31-year-old Nino Sciglitano Jr., who lived in the home.
“I need to know if he murdered my wife, but the detectives wouldn’t tell me,” he said. “They had more questions for me than answers.”
The home, in the 200 block of Beau Tree Drive, is the same place where Sciglitano’s mother, Donna, shot Nino Sciglitano Sr. to death in 2011 and tried to take her own life with pills. She is scheduled to be sentenced for the crime Jan. 18.
Donna Sciglitano’s older son by another man, Joe, said Thursday that his reaction to a second fatal shooting in the family home is “a hard thing to express.”
“It’s hard to wrap your arms around the fact that the family that you grew up with, the home you grew up in, is essentially now a house of horrors,” said Joe, who has a different last name and agreed to be identified only by his first name.
The family
Joe views Wednesday’s shooting as part of the dysfunction that had gripped the family, which includes Nino Sciglitano’s twin sister, Gina, who lives in Florida.
“Sadly, I’m not surprised at what happened here,” he said. “I actually anticipated an event like this. I wasn’t shocked about what happened before.”
Tim Tabor said that days before Wednesday’s shooting, he worried his wife might kill herself with his .9 mm Taurus or .22-caliber rifle – target-shooting guns unaccounted for in their home.
“She had been talking about how she ‘didn’t want to be here any more,’ ” Tabor said.
The Tabors had experienced their own family tragedy – their daughter, Crystal Noel, died of ovarian cancer at age 14 in 1996. The Sciglitano twins had been her best friends.
His wife had wanted to help Nino Sciglitano Jr., he said, because “she is a good-hearted woman.”
The Tabors also were friends of the Sciglitano parents, whose flooring business tanked in the recession, he said.
“They had severe financial problems and couldn’t pay their bills,” he said, and Donna Sciglitano had been laid off from her job at FedEx shortly before the first shooting.
Afterward, Tabor said, he and his wife befriended the twins. “We were both like surrogate parents to them, especially Nino,” he said.
But he had backed off, urging his wife to as well, as Nino Sciglitano wallowed in self-pity and drugs, Tabor said.
In fact, he and Suzette Tabor were arrested last April on drug and other charges. Suzette Tabor had gone into a drug diversion program; Nino Sciglitano was given 18 months’ probation in October.
With the autopsy results yet to come, it’s unclear whether there were drugs in Suzette Tabor’s system when she died.
Tim Tabor said he can’t help suspecting drugs. “I’m a diabetic,” he said, “and the detectives asked me if any of my needles were missing.”
He had tried to convince his wife to distance herself from their younger neighbor.
“I had told her, ‘You have a hard enough time standing on your own and you can’t carry him,’ ” he said. “I kept telling her they were bad for each other.”
Her arrest April 30, 2012, with Sciglitano was the first legal scrape for both of them, justice officials said Thursday.
He was charged with illegally carrying a concealed deadly weapon, having a firearm while committing a felony, conspiracy and possession of crack cocaine, methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia.
In an October deal, he pleaded guilty to cocaine possession and the concealed weapon, with other charges dropped.
He got 18 months’ probation, with evaluation and treatment for substance abuse and mental health, and no unlawful contact with Suzette Tabor. A convicted felon, he also was barred from having guns or ammo.
She was charged with conspiracy and the same drug counts – resolved last month on entering a Superior Court drug diversion program.
About that time, her husband said, she barely came home from Nino Sciglitano’s, and in the last few days, she didn’t at all. He called her all day Wednesday to get her to come home, but she didn’t answer.
Joe also blames his half brother’s problems on his longtime drug use, which eventually drove them apart.
“He and I have no relationship,” Joe said.
Sciglitano began abusing drugs about a decade ago, getting such drugs as Xanax, morphine lollipops and Percocet from a friend, he said.
At one point, Joe said, he pulled aside his mother and stepfather, telling them he feared his half brother was a drug addict.
That worked for a few months, he said, but suspected Nino Jr. returned to his addiction.
“Prior to my stepfather’s murder, we had a very strained relationship,” said Joe, adding he had ceased contact with his half brother and their mother. He had sporadic contact with his stepfather but kept in touch with Gina Sciglitano.
Joe said he distanced himself out of concern for his children. He felt it wasn’t healthy to expose them to his brother’s drug use or his mother’s increasingly bizarre behavior as the family’s finances worsened.
“The situation in that household was a downward spiral,” he said.
After Nino Sr.’s death, Nino Jr. seemed to blame Joe for his problems, he said.
His half brother didn’t threaten him directly, Joe said, but supposedly told friends he bought a gun, stacked mattresses in the basement, pinned Joe’s photos to them and shot at them.
Joe called that “highly disturbing.”
Although he recalls the family’s good times – Christmas, vacations, some visits to the home with his children – Joe said, “for the last year, I’ve been very cautious.”
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Originally Posted by lewfather
