It's by no means proven. I'll leave that to the police.
However ...
My mother (the woman who takes unreal to alarming new depths) has rushed to assume that all of the above is fact, merely because that is what the media is feeding her, of course. She is, however, clearly incapable of thinking the whole thing through, because she declared that the father shooting the daughter is perfectly OK, as "at least he did not leave her to be maimed for life."
Hello, excuse me! By her own assumptive reckonings, it follows - though she can't / won't accept / refuses see it - that the daughter would have been in no danger of death nor maiming whatsoever until the father did all those things and set light to the house that he'd barricaded them inside. Up until that point, the worst "threat" the poor girl appeared to be facing (apart from having an arsehole with no conscience for a parent, maybe) was that the family might become homeless and destitute. Well, many of us have survived worse, hell as it may be.
What we know about Kirstie is that she was on the internet at 1 a.m., seemingly going about the normal life of a 15 year old. She was a healthy teenager who rode horses and, as far as I can tell, was not "maimed", sick or disabled - not that those are valid reasons for killing someone. And just because her dad was in debt, was certainly no reason to kill his own daughter. If he wanted to commit suicide, then that's his own decision, but there is no way anyone sane would call the killing of his daughter in these circumstances, "justifiable homicide." Surely?
You can make up your own excuses for my mother. I've tried hard to make allowances for her age, or her lack of education, etc., but none of it washes: I do not think that anyone can hold such an opinion unless they are grossly and willfully ignorant, combined with some sick, nasty, cruel and sadistic tendencies ("enhanced" by old age, maybe, but that were there all along.) And I just cannot put into words the deep repulsion I feel for someone who can think like this.
