Howrey Associate, Family Members Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide
A Howrey intellectual property lawyer was found dead along with her daughters and mother Monday in an apparent murder-suicide.
Associate Elizabeth Fontaine, her two daughters and her mother were killed on the same day that a California judge gave temporary custody of the girls to an aunt, according to the Los Angeles Times’ L.A. Now blog and the Associated Press. Authorities are conducting forensics tests to determine who pulled the trigger.
Fontaine had recently requested and received a transfer to Howrey’s Houston office but had returned to Orange County for a custody hearing, the San Clemente Times reports.
Jim Amormino, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, told the San Clemente Times that the girls’ father is not a suspect. “The father was nowhere near the crime scene,” he said. “There’s no question the two children were killed first, and one of the adult females is the killer, which is unusual by itself.”
The Fontaine family had been staying with friends in San Clemente, Calif., for the court hearing. One of the friends told a neighbor he left the house with his wife and called police after he heard family members talking about something that disturbed him.
Howrey released this statement to the San Clemente Times:
“We were devastated to learn last evening that one of our associates, Elizabeth Hoult Fontaine, her mother and two daughters were found dead in a home in San Clemente, Calif.,” the statement says.
“Elizabeth had been an associate in our Irvine office since 2005 and had recently, at her request, transferred to the firm’s Houston office. She was a talented lawyer who was advancing quickly in her career at Howrey. We will feel her loss deeply as a friend and as a colleague
“We do not have any further information on this terrible tragedy.”
Fontaine is not listed on Howrey’s current website. A cached page says Fontaine is a graduate of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles whose practice focused on patent litigation. She was formerly a field engineer for Rockwell Automation.
