A spurned husband shot dead his estranged wife and her new beau after he followed her and ambushed the couple late Monday on a rural Kentucky road, police say.
Shaun Hiles, 35, then turned the gun on himself – but failed in his suicide attempt.
Authorities flew him to a Cincinnati hospital, where he underwent surgery and was in critical condition Tuesday.
The murder came just eight hours after Nicole Hiles, 35, filed an emergency protective order against the man, who wrote on Facebook recently that he’d learned his wife had been going behind his back.
“The moment when you check your cell phone bills and you catch your wife cheating on you priceless,” Hiles posted on the social media site last week.
“The war has began!!!!!!!” he wrote the next day, Friday.
By Monday, Nicole Hiles had moved out of their Dry Ridge, Ky. home and was scared enough of her estranged hubby that she filed for an emergency order of protection against him around 3 p.m.
But it was too late in the day to process, and by the time it would have gone before a judge Tuesday, she and Larry Whiteker, 32, were already dead.
“Talking to her, we learned she’s separated from her husband, marital problems, he’s tearing her stuff up and I advised her if she had been threatened, she could get an emergency protection order,” Grant County Sheriff Chuck Dills told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Police think Shaun Hiles followed his wife as she took off down Vallandingham Road in Whiteker’s truck around 11:30 p.m. When he caught up to them, Hiles struck the truck with his SUV, spinning the vehicle. Once they both stopped, Hiles fired a .357 caliber handgun, killing his estranged wife, then hopped out of his SUV with an AR-15 rifle and blasted the truck with several rounds, killing Whiteker, cops said.
“He (Shaun) had been chasing after them,” Dills told the newspaper. “We’re learning that his wife was seeing this other person and he was upset over it.”
He then used the rifle to shoot himself at least twice, leaving him injured as authorities rushed to the scene.
It’s not the first time Shaun Hiles has found himself in handcuffs.
The accused double murderer was already on probation for an attack in April when he used a tire iron to beat a coworker at a business across the nearby state border in Indiana. On Facebook, too, Hiles references “fighting” — and police in Kentucky knew the couple all too well.
“My office has been involved in a couple calls, at least, involving this married couple, the Hileses,” Dill told WXIX-TV. “There’s been domestic disputes over property and things like that.”
The couple had a 14-year-old daughter, while Nicole had an older daughter from a previous relationship.
“She was a great young lady: she was a school bus driver, a Sunday school teacher at the church,” Nicole’s father, Randy Dressman, told WKRC-TV. “She was a very good individual. And her husband, who she married, was a control freak.”
