Emington woman’s dad had also killed family member

The father of an Emington woman believed to have fatally shot her family and then herself had killed his own spouse decades ago, court records show.

Authorities have said Sara McMeen, 30, shot her boyfriend, Daniel Warren, 29, and her three children: 8-year-old Skyler Lemke, 7-year-old Ian Lemke and 10-month-old Maggie Warren. The shootings occurred Friday in the farming community of Emington, about 85 miles southwest of Chicago.

According to court records, McMeen’s father fatally shot his first wife about 10 years before McMeen was born. The shooting happened in front of the couple’s 2-year-old son.

At the time, Louis McMeen, who was then 20 years old, told police that he and Pamela Bradley McMeen, also 20, had gotten into an argument in his car on Jan. 25, 1971, and that she got out and said she was walking home.

“This is where I think I might have gone black,” he reportedly told Livingston County prosecutors back then.

He said the next thing he remembers is picking his son up off the ground before putting his wife’s bleeding body in the car. She had been shot with a 12-gauge shotgun.

He then drove to a police station in nearby Streator and told officers, “I just murdered my wife,” according to the police reports.

A jury found Louis McMeen not guilty by reason of insanity. According to records, he had been released from a psychiatric hospital about a month before the killing, after suffering what his doctors diagnosed as “an acute schizophrenic episode.”

Sheriff’s officials have said they may never know Sara McMeen’s state of mind before last week’s killings involving her family. They were waiting until after the funeral services this week to interview relatives.