Two dead in apparent murder-suicide in Jesup

JESUP - Investigators in Buchanan County spent Thursday trying to piece together the details of a murder-suicide in Jesup around 9 p.m. Wednesday.

The county attorney's office said Timothy Roses, 44, of Waterloo, shot Lindsay Nichols, 22, of Evansdale, in the chest before doing the same to himself. Nichols was taken to a hospital, where she died; Roses was pronounced dead at the scene of the shooting at Ninth and Stevens streets.

Evansdale Mayor Chad Deutsch said the Nichols family is well known there. Lindsay Nichols' father is the city's parks commissioner as well as a Black Hawk County sheriff's deputy, and her late grandfather had served as mayor.

Friends said she was a 2008 graduate of East High School in Waterloo, where a vigil was held Thursday night, and a June 2011 graduate of a medical program at Covenant Medical Center in Waterloo.

Nichols knew Roses, a Texas radiologist, through Covenant Medical Center where she had studied radiology, said John Brandenburg, an uncle of Nichols.

Brandenburg said Roses had followed Nichols to a Jesup address Wednesday before the murder-suicide took place.

“She was the sweetest girl I ever met,” Brandenburg said.

A man who lives a few doors from the intersection of Stevens and Ninth streets said he heard yelling and then two gunshots. After a few seconds, a third shot rang out.

“It scared me. I'm still shaking,” said the man, who declined to give his name.

The Nichols family is not making any comments at this time. Arrangements are pending at Kearns-Huisman-Schumacher Funeral home, Kimball Ave Waterloo.

As of Thursday morning, autopsy results were pending. The shooting is under investigation by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, the Buchanan County Sheriff's Office and the Jesup Police Department.

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