Police: Mother, Children Apparently Strangled by Spring Valley Suicide Jumper

The man who apparently overpass in Spring Valley is now suspected to have strangled to death his girlfriend and her children earlier that day in their Eastlake home.

Chula Vista Police Department spokesman Bernard Gonzalez told reporters Thursday that, "There's little doubt that these [deaths] were murders and a suicide that stemmed from a relationship that went bad."

Mary Alverez, 41, and her son, Hamid, 11, and daughter, Angelica, 12, were found dead, victims of apparent homicide. They had all evidently been asphyxiated, and both the woman and girl also had suffered severe head wounds, apparently from a blunt object of some kind, according to Gonzales. Official cause-of-death rulings, however, remained on hold pending autopsy results.

A Facebook page has been created to honor Angelica.

Police now believe that Alvarez's handyman boyfriend, whose name has yet to be released, is suspected of killing her and her children, and then committing suicide by leaping off an elevated section of state Route 125, just south of state Route 54. His body was discovered in a ravine 150 feet below the roadway by a California Highway Patrol officer who was heading to work, and who noticed Alvarez's abandoned 2001 Hyundai Elantra partially blocking a traffic lane, according to authorities.

Alvarez was a special education instructor at San Ysidro High School. She had not reported to work for at least one day before the discovery of her and her children's bodies.

The woman's boyfriend had been living with her and her children for an undetermined amount of time, and all four had moved in to the three-floor townhouse in a newly developed section of the Eastlake district of Chula Vista within the last several weeks, Gonzales said.

Alvarez, a divorcee, either had broken up with her boyfriend—who was not the youngsters' father—or was trying to, even though he had moved into the family's new home with them, according to police.

The suspected murderer apparently was self-employed, doing odd jobs and construction pick-up work for "under the table'' wages, Gonzales said.

City News Service contributed to this report.