Family Mourns SFPD Vet, Slain by Husband, and Their Daughter in Suspected Double Murder-Suicide
A note, accompanying a bouquet of flowers on the front gate of a home on Strawberry Circle, thanks Ann Mannix for being a loving mother. More bouquets are on the ground, with a pair of tennis balls bearing messages in black ink.
On Sunday evening, inside the brown, shingled home just east of Mill Valley, Mannix’s 68-year-old estranged husband — retired San Francisco Police Sgt. Kevin Mannix — shot and killed Ann, 65, and their 24-year-old daughter, Katie, before turning the gun on himself. Another one of their children escaped the home alive.
Mannix, a retired SFPD deputy chief herself, is being remembered for her longtime service to SFPD, but also as a mother who cared deeply for her children and a sister who acted as a good role model.
Ann’s brother, Richard Corriea — also retired SFPD — said he had been helping Ann navigate the end of her marriage, during which she was mostly concerned about her three adult kids.
“If her decision-making about protecting herself as her marriage was coming to an end, I think that it might have been protectiveness towards her children also, and wanting to keep their lives intact, so to speak,” Corriea told KQED in a phone interview on Tuesday.
Corriea said one of his first memories in life was when his parents brought Ann, the youngest of five, home from the hospital. He even remembers the crimped lead binder of the bracelet on her ankle.
“From the beginning, she was so special,” he said.
Despite Ann being three and a half years younger than him, Corriea said he still looked up to her. “She was just great at so many things,” he said.
Corriea recalled when they both were still young in their working lives. Ann was working at Toys ‘R’ Us, he said, when he told his sister about how much he made working for SFPD compared with the hours he put in. She took the hint and followed in the family’s long line of service in SFPD.
Unlike Corriea, she took a keen interest in the department’s culture, rising up the ranks and becoming the first woman to join the SWAT team, and then its leader, along with both the Field Operations and Special Operations Bureaus.
Correia remembered a time when his sister was doing undercover narcotics work in the Haight, and she chased a suspect into an older apartment building, where he knocked down a door. Ann followed through a family’s apartment, where the suspect jumped out a window onto the roof of a garage. Ann pursued the suspect until he jumped off that roof, injuring himself when he hit the ground.
“I don’t know many people that would do all that, the running through apartments,” Correia said. “It was like a scene out of something like Serpico. She was brave, very brave.”
When she was done chasing suspects at work, Correia said, Ann was a dedicated mother, whose three children followed her around like little ducklings.
Correia said Katie, the youngest, took after her mother and grew up to be a strong, independent and outspoken young woman.
“You could get five people agreeing on something around a table, and Katie, if she felt strongly about it, would be glad to bring up another perspective,” he said. “She loved her home and her family, but could take off and drive to Southern California to visit friends on a moment’s notice.”
Katie Mannix was a second-year nursing student at the College of Marin.
KQED is not naming the other adult Mannix children out of respect for their privacy, as they mourn the loss of three family members.
Correia said the family remains in shock over the shooting, cycling between periods of feeling numb or crying. But he is thankful for the support people have been showing by visiting or simply leaving food on their doorsteps, including the woman who dropped off four large bags from Costco.
“We’re going to be getting heavy around here, if we ever start eating,” he said. “If you spend your life serving and helping people, it is so hard when it’s your turn.”
Correia called the tragedy that has struck his family a mix of “guns, mental illness and marital strife,” and said that it takes more effort to change a lightbulb than it does to pick up a gun and take someone’s life.
He said he would have done more sooner if there was violence in his sister’s marriage, but that there wasn’t any known physical violence before Sunday. He said he even double-checked with his niece to make sure there wasn’t anything he didn’t know about their situation.
“There was no violence, but here we end up with a catastrophic level of violence without a history of it,” he said.
Correia said he checked his phone on Monday and realized that he had spoken with Ann on a daily basis as she started navigating the next chapter of her life.
“I miss my sister. We talked almost daily. I had lunch and dinner with her both in the last two and a half weeks. I’m blessed with good memories, but I’m lost for words.”
Family and friends are gathering at Correia’s San Francisco home this week to support one another and sort out funeral details, but he said he keeps forgetting that not everyone will be there.
“I keep miscounting the number of people in my family,” he said. “Like, I go, ‘They’re all here. Where are they all going to sleep?’”
“And I go, ‘Oh my God, we’re three short now.’”