July 22, 2007, was a seemingly regular Sunday for the Petit family of four. After church, mom Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her two daughters, Hayley Petit, 17, and Michaela Petit, 11, visited the beach while their father Dr. William Petit Jr. went golfing.
Nobody may have imagined the horrors that may observe quickly after. Whereas the household was sleeping within the early morning hours of July 23, two males — later recognized as Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky — broke into the Petit’s Cheshire, Conn., dwelling, held the household hostage for hours and assaulted them. What was allegedly imagined to be a housebreaking changed into a brutal triple-murder involving sexual assaults that left a mom and her two daughters useless and a father reeling.
Earlier than dinner that night, Michaela and Jennifer went to the shop to buy substances for dinner. However Komisarjevsky was additionally on the retailer that night — and he adopted them dwelling after selecting them as targets, the Associated Press reported.
Round 3 a.m., Komisarjevsky and Hayes broke into the house, beat William with a baseball bat, then tied up Jennifer, Hayley and Michaela, PEOPLE previously reported. They locked William within the basement, then sexually assaulted Jennifer and Hayley.
“What all of them went by, particularly little Michaela, it fully broke me up,” one of many Petits’ neighbors, who lived throughout the road, told PEOPLE in a 2007 cover story. “The anger and the unhappiness and absolutely the outrage at what occurred to that household is past description.”
Connecticut State Police through AP
Roughly six hours later, the boys drove Jennifer to a financial institution and compelled her to take out a big sum of cash. There, she tried to subtly get help from the tellers. In response to previous reporting, the police have been referred to as after the financial institution run, however by the point they arrived to the Petit household dwelling, it was too late.
Jennifer had been strangled to dying and Michaela and Hayley died from smoke inhalation after Komisarjevsky doused the house with gasoline and set it on hearth. Nonetheless, William — who remained out and in of consciousness within the basement throughout the assaults — was in a position to escape the house together with his legs nonetheless certain. He had a number of accidents.
Wish to sustain with the newest crime protection? Join PEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime information, ongoing trial protection and particulars of intriguing unsolved circumstances.
Komisarjevsky and Hayes have been shortly apprehended and charged. Throughout their trial, William testified about that horrific night. Komisarjevsky was convicted of 17 fees, CNN reported in 2011. The costs included homicide, kidnapping, housebreaking, arson and assault. Hayes was convicted of the identical fees apart from arson, which he was discovered not responsible of.
William has since created the Petit Family Foundation in reminiscence of his spouse and daughters. In response to the inspiration’s about web page, Hayley was getting ready for her freshman yr at Dartmouth School and Michaela was a sixth grader.
AP Photograph/Jessica Hill
On the household’s memorial, William, “requested these gathered to ‘assist a neighbor, combat for a trigger, and love your loved ones’ as a technique to honor the recollections of his household and make the world a greater place to reside,” based on the web page.
