Apple Valley 'apparent murder-suicide' involved two adults, one child

The three people found dead in an Apple Valley home Saturday afternoon included two adults and one child, police said Sunday morning.

Officers went to a house in the 1000 block of Ramsdell Drive after a neighbor called about bodies inside. When police arrived, they found three bodies. A statement from Apple Valley police Sunday morning said those dead included a child, and that they considered it "an apparent murder-suicide."

Next-door neighbor Collin Prochnow, who discovered the bodies and notified police, said Sunday that the deceased were David Crowley, 29, his wife, Komel, 28, and their 5-year-old daughter.

The bodies were taken to the Hennepin County Medical Examiners office, according to police.

By early Sunday afternoon, no police tape remained at the scene, a neighborhood of middle-class homes. The home where the bodies were found was a half-brick white rambler with a fenced back yard.

Prochnow said he went to the house on Saturday to gather packages that were sitting on the front steps. That is when he looked inside and saw the bodies, he said. A dog was also in the house, he said.

Several neighbors said they thought Crowley may have been a military or ex-military member, and that he had close-cropped hair and tattoos. One neighbor said he thought Crowley worked at home doing screenwriting of some kind, and that his wife worked as a dietitian.

In a YouTube video, Crowley is credited as writer and director of a movie-in-progress, "Gray State." The trailer shows scenes of a militarized police force, much gun violence and some kind of citizen insurgency. The trailer solicits online donors to help finance the project.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Dakota County Sheriff's Office are assisting the Apple Valley Police Department with the investigation.

Police said they didn't know how long the bodies had been there, but Prochnow theorizes it may have been since before Christmas, due to the packages that had not been taken inside. Prochnow had not seen the family members since before Christmas, he said, adding that the family had lived there for about a year-and-a-half.

Alice Hixson and her husband, Bill, have lived across the street for 21 years. They said they saw the family in passing and had seen the father and his daughter playing in the back yard. "It's such a grisly, gruesome thing," Alice Hixson said.

Maya Rao contributed to this report.