EL PASO, Texas -- At 2:45 a.m. Saturday, Dona Ana County deputies found a 35-year-old woman dead in her Las Cruces home, and a man they said stabbed her to death sleeping next to her.
A neighbor, who doesn't want to be named, told KFOX-14 that she woke up early Saturday morning to her doorbell ringing repeatedly, and it was two of the victim's children, 10 and 13 years old.
The children told their neighbor they woke up to their father, 29-year-old Horace Carlos Solomon, fighting with their mother, Jennifer Bates-Solomon.
"My mom's dead," the neighbor said they told her. "She's on the floor between the kitchen and the living room and she's dead. He killed her."
The neighbor called 911, and Dona Ana County sherrif's deputies soon arrived.
"The (children) were shaking from the bottom of their feet to the top of their heads," the neighbor said.
"(Deputies) made contact with the two small children," deputy Kelly Jameson told KFOX-14. "The suspect did not live at the home."
The children told the neighbor that Bates-Solomon told them to call 9-11. As the children grabbed a cell phone to make the call, they said Solomon grabbed the phone, broke it in half and told them he'd kill them if they left the house.
According to the neighbor, the children said Horace Solomon broke into the home through the front door. Jameson said Bates-Solomon had a restraining order against him, and that he was her ex-husband.
"She was stabbed multiple times by what we beleive was a kitchen knife," Jameson said.
The neighbor said the children told her it was a steak knife, and that their mother was stabbed at least 10 times.
"(They watched) their mother die and (were not able) to leave that house," the neighbor said. "Yes, he made them watch...made them watch her die."
The kids also told the neighbor that after stabbing Bates-Solomon to death, Solomon started drinking a bottle of vodka.
"He drank so much he finally passed out," the neighbor said the kids told her.
After Solomon passed out, the neighbor told KFOX-14 the traumatized kids waited about at hour and then mustered the courage to creep out of the house.
Just before they did, they told the neighbor they tried to wake up their 8-year-old brother, who had been sleeping. They said he didn't want to wake up, and that's when they left the home and hurried about 50 feet to the neighbor's house and told her to call police.
"What we're learning now is (Solomon) was heavily intoxicated," Jameson said. "(He was) believed to be passed out in the home."
Police found Solomoon asleep next to his dead ex-wife.
"They just literally drug him out (of the house)," the neighbor said. "(He went) boom, boom, boom, down their stairs, (and they) put him in handcuffs and into the police car."
"Those kids are going to have to live with that for the rest of their lives and that just bothers me," the neighbor said. "It bothers me."
Solomon was in the Dona Ana County Detention Center Saturday night, Jameson said. He has been charged with felony murder, two counts of child abuse and two counts of faulty imprisonment.
All of the children are physically OK, deputies said.
The neighbor told KFOX-14 that the 10 and 8-year-old boys were the ex-couple's kids, and that the 13-year-old girl was Bates-Solomon's from a previous relationship.
Stay with KFOX-14 for updates to this story.
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