Couple found dead in home
Published 5:17 pm Wednesday, July 24, 2013
A couple believed aged in their 60s were found dead Wednesday in their Nansemond River Estates home after friends and neighbors noticed their absence from church and an overflowing mailbox and notified police.
Crystal Robbins said she works as a nanny for the family next door to 3300 Nansemond River Drive — the house on the corner of Sleepy Hole Road where the bodies were subsequently found — and called police about 10 a.m. Wednesday morning.
“Last time I saw him, Thursday, he was taking out the trash,” she said. “I was talking to him.”
James Watson of Mintonville Point Drive, one street over, said he knew the couple from the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses on White Marsh Road, and had knocked on the front door Wednesday.
Watson said he attended a different congregation that worshipped at the same hall, and they would usually cross paths there Wednesdays and Thursdays.
He last saw the husband at a Jehovah’s Witnesses annual district convention at Hampton Coliseum two weeks ago, Watson said.
“I’m shocked, because he was at the convention and I talked to him,” he said. “We weren’t buddy-buddy, but I knew him.”
Watson said he had finally assumed they had gone somewhere with their son.
“He had some sicknesses, but we all got some sicknesses at our age,” he said. “She had some sicknesses (as well).”
Late Wednesday, Suffolk police were calling both deaths “undetermined,” and stated that a relative gave officers permission to enter the home.
Robbins said authorities told her the man had suffered a heart attack, but added that they were not sure.
She did not confirm whether it was Watson, but said a church member had come by the house where she works early Wednesday morning to ask if she’d “heard or seen anything.”
“I then realized I haven’t,” Robbins said. “I went over the knocked myself (but) no one answered. I noticed the mail stacking up.”
It also occurred to her, she said, that the couple’s Honda had been parked in the same position in the driveway for a “couple of days.”
“He was a really good man,” Robbins said. “I enjoyed talking to him. It’s hard, because the two kids I nanny play with them all the time. It’s, like, what do I tell them? They are only 4 and 3.”
Police are withholding the names of the couple until they have notified the next of kin, and the bodies were to be taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office to determine how they died.
“No foul play is suspected and the case remains under investigation,” a news release stated. Det. R. Cain is the lead investigator.