Family says murder-suicide may be result of financial, chemical instability

The murder-suicide in Clarkston last weekend that left behind two young children was possibly the result of a mixture of chemical dependency and financial burdens, say some of the people most closely affected.

“It was an unfortunate event with the combination of several things: financial instability, and maybe alcohol and maybe mental health that contributed to the incident,” said Brian Siegel, 60, great-grandfather of two children left behind by the incident.

On Saturday evening, Sergio Hernandez, 37, shot and killed his significant other, Eliza Elias, 32, before shooting himself. The couple’s children, 1 and 3 years old, were in another part of the house with their great grandmother, Nemy Spiegel. They were unharmed.

Spiegel said he had been out with Sergio and Eliza to dinner and a movie earlier. He said there were no warning signs that night or in recent days.

“I was with them hours before it happened. They were happy but they were jokingly saying things and she kept flicking Sergio’s ears,” Brian Spiegel said. “We went to a movie. We saw ‘The Naked Gun’ and then went to Zany Graze for drinks and nachos. The last thing my daughter said was, ‘I love you, Dad, thank you,’ and that was it.”

Spiegel thinks that “horseplay” earlier possibly contributed to the “disaster” later at their home on the 1200 block of Boston Street. He noted that Hernandez was possibly unstable as “a recovering meth user” who was under financial stress. Hernandez, who had decades of experience as a cook, was a key part of the cooking staff at Applebee’s in Lewiston. But his paycheck was stretched too thin to cover his two children in Clarkston as well as children from a previous relationship in California.

“Sergio was a loving father,” Spiegel said.

Elias called Spiegel “Dad” even though he was her step-grandfather. Elias was a licensed vocational nurse in California, and was working to get her license in Washington. The couple had moved away from Van Nuys, Calif., because the lower cost of living and better job prospects in Clarkston offered greater opportunity, Spiegel said. Both couples and the kids shared the house.

Nemy and Brian volunteered to take over raising the children. They hope to move to a new place within a month. Other family members created a GoFundMe page to contribute to costs of raising the kids, which had raised more than $19,000 as of Tuesday evening. The fundraising page can be found at bit.ly/3Hu1wcn.

The Asotin County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the incident.