Eight people are dead in rural Missouri after a gunman when door to door killing people, a tragedy that police say was sparked by the perpetrator finding his mother dead in her home of apparently natural causes.

Jospeh Jesse Aldridge, 36, of Tyrone, Mo., was found dead in his pickup truck in the middle of the road in Shannon County, 15 miles south of his home in the south-central part of the state, apparently dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to a USA Today report.

Police say his mother, 74-year-old Alice Aldridge, was found dead on her couch in a small house that they shared together.

Aldridge apparently went on a shooting spree, taking the lives of seven people, including four of his cousins: 52-year-old Garold Dee Aldridge; 47-year-old Julie Ann Aldridge; 50-year-old Harold Wayne Aldridge; and 48-year-old Janell Arlisa Aldridge, according to the Missouri Highway Patrol.

Highway Patrol Sgt. Jeff Kinder was quoted in the report as saying that the incident was “hard on the police officers who are working that there,” and that it was “not natural to see that sort of thing.”

The shootings took place within a three-mile radius, and the names of three of the victims were being withheld. All of the bodies were found in five separate homes after a 911 call came in around 10:15 Thursday evening about a disturbance.

The caller was a 15-year-old girl who said she heard gunshots and had run to a neighbor’s house to call the police. The neighbor said the girl was crying when she arrived and said her parents had been shot.

The girl, who was dressed only in a nightgown and had scratches on her legs from underbrush, said a man had been in her dad’s bedroom speaking to him in a normal voice before opening fire.

Hours later, deputies discovered the bodies of a man and a woman at the first house and found five more bodies in the other houses, as well as a woman who was hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds. One child, a 10-year-old boy who was sleeping during the shooting, was not injured.