On the day he turned 52, Robert Carson shot his wife as she lay in bed, then pointed the handgun at himself and pulled the trigger — a murder-suicide that has puzzled family members who remember the couple's 19-year marriage as a relatively tranquil one.
Carson, a former air traffic controller at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, had turned 52 on Sunday.
That evening, his wife, Helen, called her two children to remind them to wish their stepfather a happy birthday. That was the last they heard from her.
The next morning, when Helen Carson, 47, did not show up at her job at an accounting firm, her co-workers called family members to check up on her.
At first they didn't think much of it, said her brother, Al Noll, Tuesday night. They figured Helen Carson had taken the day off to continue her husband's birthday celebrations.
But when Noll went to check on the house on the 800 block of Waterbrook Circle Monday afternoon, he immediately sensed something was wrong.
The dogs were barking and had made a mess on the floor that had not been picked up. Upstairs, he found the body of his sister on the bed. Nearby, her husband lay in a pool of blood on the floor.
Roswell police said Robert Carson had shot his wife to death, and then killed himself. Police records show that officers were dispatched to the residence on a domestic disturbance call — but that was five years ago. And that is what has family members so confused.
Noll said the couple was planning on selling their house and moving to Panama City, where Carson intended to take up another job as an air traffic controller.
He had retired from the Atlanta airport about two years ago. But he loved to deep-sea fish and he enjoyed his job, and was thinking of being somewhere where he could combine the two.
"The funny thing is, he just bought a car and the two of them went to Panama City to test drive it," Noll, of Roswell, said.
Noll offered that Carson had had some "stress issues," having worked for years as an air traffic controller at the world's busiest airport.
The U.S. Dept. of Labor's Occupational Outlook Handbook has this sentence in its entry on the profession: "The mental stress of being responsible for the safety of several aircraft and their passengers can be exhausting."
But, said Noll, they were a loving couple. The instance in 2002 when police were called to the house stemmed from a loud argument that prompted a concerned neighbor to call 911.
Helen Carson leaves behind a son and a daughter, both in their 20s. Her funeral is set for Thursday at the Good Shepherd Catholic Church in Cumming, where her parents live.