Ex-GTV anchor, family found shot dead in Atlanta
Stabroek News
January 29, 2003
Former GTV News Anchor and journalist Ian Willabus, his wife and three children were all found shot to death in their Atlanta apartment in the United States yesterday afternoon.
Reports coming out of the US said the police were reluctant to release the identities of the victims. However, when contacted last night, Willabus’s relatives here confirmed the report. One of the dead man’s relatives told this newspaper that information reaching her stated only that the “bodies were found”.
A report in yesterday’s internet edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) stated that “DeKalb County police are investigating an apparent murder-suicide that left a Decatur couple and three children dead of gunshot wounds.” The children, all boys and from Willabus’s first marriage, were said to be ages 10, 5 and 3.
According to other reports out of Atlanta, one of Willabus’s co-workers went to check on him after he failed to report for work at CNN International where he was a freelance writer.
The police upon checking the Kenwood Apartments, which is located in the 1300 block of Kenridge Parkway, where the family lived, discovered the 33-year-old man, his 32-year-old American wife, Diane and the three boys.
Willabus reportedly did not show up for work Sunday, Monday or yesterday. It has not yet been verified how long the victims may have been dead.
“We’re looking at least a couple of days as far as the incident itself, but we were notified today,” one spokes-person told the AJC.
The newspaper report also quoted CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard as confirming that the dead man was a freelance writer for CNN Interna-tional and “contributed frequently on a broad array of subjects” for the network. It said Pritchard would not identify the man. The article said the police had not received any recent calls reporting gunshots in the area.
Willabus, who left Guyana about five years ago, served mainly at the Guyana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) and anchored for GTV’s Six O’ Clock News.
