Gun-toting soccer mom fatally shot while on Web cam

LEBANON, Pa. - Amid the domestic stillness of just another evening at home, the Hain family's troubles exploded into homicide Wednesday with a mutual friend powerlessly looking on via the Internet.

Meleanie Hain, 31, a mother of three and latter-day national symbol of the gun-rights movement for her insistence on openly carrying a loaded Glock handgun, was unarmed in her kitchen and idly Web-chatting with a family friend.

She was, her mother said, about to leave her husband, after the latest episode of their fight-and-reconciliation cycle had ended poorly, and Scott Hain, 33, was displeased.

"Scott was not a person to be by himself," said Jenny Stanley of Lancaster, Meleanie Hain's mother.

Outside the webcam's view, Scott Hain picked up a gun. By then, the chat partner, in another Pennsylvania county, had let his attention wander over to the television.

Then, at what police would say later was 6:07 p.m., the online feed erupted with a gunshot and a scream, and the friend saw Scott Hain walk into view. He raised a handgun and fired several times, and the friend called 911.

By the time police arrived, Meleanie Hain was dead in the kitchen, and Scott Hain had used a shotgun to commit suicide in an upstairs bedroom.

Their three children, a neighbor said, had run from the house shouting, "Daddy shot Mommy!"

Although police revealed new details yesterday from their investigation into the Wednesday-night murder-suicide, they refused to say what the children saw.

"I believe those three children will have enough problems in their life," Lebanon Police Chief Daniel J. Wright said.

Wright did not release video from the webcam, but he described the scene vividly.

Meleanie Hain, he said, was shot several times; Scott, once. Scott Hain was found beside the shotgun he used to commit suicide, and his pocket contained a 9mm pistol, registered to him, with six bullets missing.

Six shell casings were found on the kitchen floor. Meleanie's 9mm pistol, with a full magazine and a bullet in the chamber, was in a backpack hanging from the front door.

Wright said that because the weapons were of the same caliber, only ballistics tests could confirm that Scott Hain had used his own gun to shoot his wife. The tests, he said, could take months if authorities decide to order them in a case in which there is no one alive to prosecute.

The murder-suicide happened more than a year after Meleanie Hain became a national figure for carrying her Glock handgun to her 5-year-old daughter's preschool soccer game.

She had told interviewers that she feared unforeseen dangers in her quiet, rural community, about 80 miles west of Philadelphia and not far from Lancaster's Amish communities.

Instead, the danger arose from her decaying marriage, despite its veneer of domesticity. On Wednesday, Scott Hain had mowed the yard before going inside and leveling his gun at his wife.

"I think he was just devastated at the potential of losing his wife, and so he made it so she couldn't leave," said Stanley, who spent yesterday calling friends and relatives with the sad news and making arrangements for her daughter's funeral.