When a person is murdered in the wee hours of the morning, say between 1 AM and 6 AM, what is the standard procedure for notifying the family? Do police officers make the notification shortly after the murder, or do they wait until day break?
Also, how do the police go about making death notification when a single parent of minor children is murdered? I ask this because I’ve read that police officers should not give death notification to children, but how else could the children learn of the death when there is no adult family member around to tell them?
Why would notification for a murder be any different than any other sudden death? I don’t think it would. I think the assumption that it would overestimates the difference in immediate shock and grief between having a loved one murdered and having a loved one die unexpectedly in any other way. My uncle ODed and/or committed suicide a couple of years ago, and my grandmother was roused at her home at 2am by a police officer to be given the news. She broke the news to his 9 year old son after sunrise.
Also, it just doesn’t make sense. It often takes quite a while to conclude definitively that someone was murdered. The best someone could say at that point is, ‘‘appears to have been murdered.’’ I don’t even think if the crime scene is bathed in blood with a cryptic ‘‘REDRUM’’ on the wall they can still call it murder until the autopsy.
I would have to conclude based on these two points that notification in the event of murder is the same for any other unexpected death.