Ex Shot Mother-of-5 Dead in Front of Her Child, 3, in Murder-Suicide Just Days Before Christmas By Chris Spargo

Five young children in Arizona will be marking the holiday season without a mother after a murder-suicide earlier this week.

Selena Felix, 30, was discovered dead outside her home in Phoenix at approximately 3:30 a.m. on Dec. 22, according to the Phoenix Police Department.

The young mother had been shot multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene.

PPD then got to work trying to identify any suspicious vehicles in the area, and when they ran one plate, they learned that the driver had been pulled over by officers just an hour prior for a traffic stop.

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When 23-year-old Alexis Torres was pulled over, however, police say he immediately fled the vehicle and proceeded to barricade himself inside a nearby home.

As officers tried to negotiate with Torres and get him out of the home, police say they heard a single gunshot and later found Torres dead from a self-inflicted wound.

They also found a 3-year-old child in Torres’s car.

It would be another hour before police linked Torres to the crime, and nearly three more hours before they identified the toddler in the vehicle — after a family member reported the child missing from Felix’s home.

Investigators now say that Torres took the child from Felix on the night of Dec. 21 and killed his ex as part of a custody dispute, despite court documents stating that he is not the child’s father.

Felix’s family remembered her as a “loving mother, a caring sister, and a friend to many” on a GoFundMe page and said her five young children are “struggling to understand why their mother is no longer with them.”

Police said they are still investigating the case at this time.