Police identify 4 victims, alleged shooter found dead in Duluth

DULUTH – Anthony Nephew, 46, is suspected of shooting four people, including two juveniles, before killing himself in a tragedy that unfolded after Duluth police were called to conduct a welfare check Thursday at a house on the 6000 block of Tacony Street.

There, they found Erin Abramson, 47, and Jacob Nephew, 15, dead from apparent gunshot wounds at the house in the quiet West Duluth neighborhood. Crime-scene investigators and Duluth police were on the scene beyond the early evening, as neighbors lingered in their yards.

After discovering Abramson and Nephew, they secured the perimeter of a house on the 4400 block of W. Sixth Street — less than a mile away and across from Denfeld High School — where they found Kathryn Nephew, 45, and Oliver Nephew, 7, also dead from gunshot wounds. Anthony Nephew was also found, apparently dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to Duluth police.

It remains an open investigation.

Kathryn and Anthony Nephew were featured in a 2015 Duluth News Tribune story about the competitive local housing market. Described as a married couple, they had finally found the house in West Duluth. Over the years they added a lofted playhouse and a “gift library” to the property. Anthony Nephew also wrote a column for the same newspaper about the importance of mental health care.

He said in the 2021 column that it’s time to start building better frameworks for mental health in this country. Most Americans, he wrote, deny they have mental health struggles.

“Because they have to, because they’re told to, or because they don’t realize their mind is broken, they keep pushing forward, incurring one psychic injury after another, trauma after trauma, collecting interest, until finally the synapses overload, and they suffer a breakdown,” he wrote.

“For most of us, that’s the best end result. For millions of Americans, a breakdown leads to suicide — or homicide before suicide.

In the piece, Nephew describes himself as a 1996 graduate of Denfeld High School with a son at Marshall School. He had written the piece while in therapy following “a mental breakdown,” and because he felt he had been “bottling things up.”