Editor’s note: If you or someone you know is struggling or having thoughts of suicide, you are not alone — and help is always available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to connect with a trained counselor, or chat online at 988lifeline.org. Whether you’re seeking support for yourself or someone you care about, please know that it’s never too late to reach out. You deserve help. You deserve hope. Someone is ready to listen.
By Madison Smalstig
The Press Democrat
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — A murder-suicide in Santa Rosa has left three young children without parents, after an off-duty Sonoma County sheriff’s deputy fatally shot his former partner — also a sheriff’s employee — before killing himself, police said.
None of the children — twin toddlers and an infant — were physically hurt, and they are now in the care of relatives, Santa Rosa police Sgt. Patricia Seffens said.
Police identified the shooter as Jeremy Lyle, 44, a sheriff’s deputy, and the victim as Mari Bonnici, 38, a detention specialist with the same agency.
Officers were called about 7:02 p.m. Sunday to an apartment on Quigg Drive near Sonoma Highway after a neighbor reported that Lyle handed her an infant and told her to call 911 because the child’s mother was hurt. They arrived to find Bonnici dead on a couch from at least one gunshot wound. The two toddlers were in a back bedroom.
As police searched for Lyle, they learned he was a sheriff’s deputy. Around 7:32 p.m., his personal truck was found in the parking lot of the Sonoma County Coroner’s Office on Chanate Road in Fountaingrove.
Officers blocked traffic in both directions as a precaution, and a sheriff’s helicopter circled overhead for about 40 minutes, according to an online public flight tracker.
Lyle was found in the bed of his truck, holding a handgun behind his back, Seffens said. Santa Rosa SWAT officers and hostage negotiators tried to talk him into surrendering for nearly five hours before he died from a single self-inflicted gunshot wound around 2 a.m. Monday.
Police said Lyle and Bonnici had been in a relationship but were separated. There were no prior domestic violence reports involving them, police said.
Court records show Bonnici filed June 10 to end their domestic partnership, which had lasted about seven months — April to November 2024 — citing irreconcilable differences. She requested legal and physical custody of the children and for Lyle to have visitation, but no overnights, saying that would be safer for them. She also alleged in the filing that Lyle had a history of committing abuse.
The document did not specify who was targeted, though it indicated it could have been a child or his current spouse.
Santa Rosa police are handling the case because it occurred within city limits.
“The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office family is grieving an unimaginable loss,” the agency said in a news release Monday. “We extend our deepest condolences to Mari’s family and loved ones. We are grieving alongside them.”
Sheriff Eddie Engram declined to comment Monday afternoon, according to spokesperson Sgt. Juan Valencia, who said Engram had been up all night meeting with staff.
Lyle was hired by the Sheriff’s Office in March 2015 and had served in Timber Cove since fall 2019. In 2022, he earned $365,765 — putting him among the top 10 highest-paid Sonoma County officials that year. That figure included about $169,330 in overtime pay, reflecting chronic staffing shortages that required deputies to work extensive additional hours, according to county payroll data.
As the Sheriff’s Office and Santa Rosa police dealt with the aftermath of the shooting, questions also arose about how information was shared with the public.
Santa Rosa police did not issue any public alerts about the incident Sunday night, according to CivicReady, the city’s emergency notification system.
In the absence of official information, rumors about the call and law enforcement’s response spread online. That left some residents confused, including Sabrina Hearst, a 20-year Santa Rosa resident, who was on an evening walk in a Hidden Valley neighborhood south of Chanate Road and the Paulin Creek area when she noticed the helicopter hovering overhead.
Around 8:15 p.m., as she neared Rolling Hill and Oak Hill drives, an officer approached her and told her law enforcement was asking residents to shelter in place. Hearst said she appreciated the officer’s communication but was puzzled by the lack of a public alert.
“There was no formal notification anywhere,” said Hearst, who served in the U.S. Coast Guard as a chief radioman, relaying safety notices to mariners.
Santa Rosa police said they did not issue an alert Sunday night because the suspect’s identity had not been confirmed and, once it was, his location was found within about 30 minutes, Sgt. Seffens told The Press Democrat on Monday afternoon.
She said they determined there was no citywide safety threat because Lyle was contained at a closed county facility with no nearby homes.
The department said it waited until Monday afternoon to release any information because the case remained an active investigation and, typically, the names of the deceased are not disclosed until the coroner confirms their identities and notifies next of kin — a process that usually takes days but was expedited in this case.
Still, the decision not to alert residents or release basic details for nearly 17 hours has drawn questions from community members and raised broader concerns about how police communicate during high-profile incidents involving their own personnel.
The case adds to a year already marked by a series of deadly incidents in Santa Rosa. It is the city’s ninth homicide this year — seven involving direct acts of violence and two tied to fentanyl overdoses — most of which occurred in the first two months. It is the third murder-suicide.
In January, four family members were found shot to death in a senior living community in what police determined was murder-suicide likely carried out by the father.
Later that month, a 20-year-old man was fatally shot during a dispute at a home on Hoen Avenue. Santa Rosa resident Devin Michael McKenzie, who was stabbed during the altercation, was arrested and charged with murder. His jury trial, initially set for June, was postponed to September.
Two days after that shooting, a woman was found dead with a gunshot wound to her torso on a southwest Santa Rosa sidewalk. Two men were arrested. Prosecutors charged Domingo Miguel Lopez with murder and several firearm-related offenses. He has pleaded not guilty and is due back in court later this month. A co-defendant’s charges were dismissed in April.
In February, 16-year-old Gia Walsh and her boyfriend, 18-year-old Logan Camp, died of fentanyl overdoses in her bedroom. Authorities arrested 21-year-old Ramon Nunez in connection with their deaths and the overdoses of two other teens. He faces charges including giving drugs to a minor in the nonfatal cases, but no homicide charges have been filed.
In June, a man and a woman, both 24, were found shot to death in an apartment off Atlanta Court near Hoen Avenue. Police later determined the man fatally shot his girlfriend before killing himself.
Outside Santa Rosa, there has been two other suspected murder-suicides in Sonoma County this year.
In April, the bodies of a 32-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman were found in their home near Riesling Street in Cloverdale. Police said the man shot the woman before killing himself. The two had recently ended their seven-year relationship and were in the process of separating.
Nine days later, on April 19, a man and woman in their 60s were found dead in their apartment, their bodies believed to have been there for two to three weeks. Authorities later confirmed it was a murder-suicide.
The Santa Rosa case, like others in Sonoma County this year, reflects a national pattern in which women are far more often the victims of murder-suicides.
In 2021 — the most recent year for which data is available — women were more than five times as likely as men to be killed by an intimate partner, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice.
That year, 258 murder-suicides nationwide claimed 588 lives — 330 homicide victims and 258 perpetrators who died by suicide — according to a 2023 study from the Violence Policy Center, a national nonprofit focused on reducing gun deaths. Of those killed, 69% were women, 27% were men and 4% were not identified by sex. Among the suicides, 91% were men and 5% were women.
More than half of murder-suicide victims — 57% — were current or former intimate partners of the perpetrator, a 2025 Columbia University study found. The analysis, based on data from 30 states between 2016 and 2022, also noted that nearly all of the suicides involved a firearm.
© 2025 The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, Calif.). Visit www.pressdemocrat.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
