November 05, 2007 mlive plainwell puzzled

Plainwell puzzled by murder-suicide
Posted by mholland November 05, 2007 12:56PM
http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2007/11/plainwell_puzzled_by_murdersui.html

OTSEGO -- Plainwell police officers today are struggling to understand what may have prompted a seven-year officer on the force to kill his wife and then shoot himself late Sunday.

"We are at a loss when it comes to that," said Plainwell Public Safety Director Bill Bomar.

"We don't know much about what his marital life was like."

After a relative called Otsego police, officers went to the home of Kevin and Pam Brainard, 707 Brookside Drive, and found Pam Brainard, 33, dead of gunshot wounds. Kevin Brainard also was in the house, critically wounded from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

He later died at Borgess-Pipp Hospital.Court records show the Brainards were married Sept. 16, 2006, in Plainwell and bought the Brookside Drive house in 2005.

Bomar described Kevin Brainard as a "very good officer" and said he was active in the community as an assistant soccer coach at Otsego High School."

Soccer and firefighting were his passions," Bomar said.The next-door neighbor of the Brainards said the couple has a 2-year-old daughter. The neighbor, Patricia Finnegan, did not know whether the daughter was home when the shootings occurred.

Finnegan said the Brainards seemed like a normal couple and had made many improvements to their house."They put a lot of work into the house. They put new windows in and added a sunroom," she said, describing them as "very nice."

She was not aware of any domestic problems in the family and wonders what might have prompted the shooting."Everybody is asking that, but nobody has answers," she said.

Meanwhile, the Plainwell Police Department has brought grief counselors to help other officers cope with the deaths.