Israeli woman and her children found dead in Arizona

Israeli Yafit Butwin and the rest of her family were found scorched in the family’s sport utility vehicle in the Arizona desert, police in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe said Tuesday.

An acquaintance of the Butwin family told police on Monday that he was concerned about them after receiving a note from Yafit’s husband James with instructions on how to operate his construction business without him, Tempe police Sgt. Jeff Glover said.

Glover said that James and his wife were experiencing financial difficulties. Court records show that Yafit filed for divorce in September and that the process was ongoing.

Two of the couple’s three children were teenagers; the third was a pre-teen. Glover did not have their exact ages.

A crisis response team from Tempe’s Jewish Family & Children’s Service was dispatched to Temple Emanuel on Wednesday, the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix reported, and professionals were also sent to the East Valley Jewish Community Center, where the youngest Butwin child was to have been a summer camper. Team members were planning to offer counseling to those attending a 7 p.m. service of grief at the Reform congregation on Wednesday.

Investigators at the Butwin found “suspicious and concerning” evidence, but not the Butwins, and began treating the case as a murder-suicide. The family’s white Ford Expedition also was gone.

Glover declined to specify what the evidence was but said no murder weapon was found in the home.

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office had found five bodies burned beyond recognition in a white Ford Expedition in the desert 35 miles south of Phoenix on Saturday morning.

Glover said that the sheriff’s office has since notified them that the SUV in the desert was registered to the Butwin family’s home.

He said that although they can’t be entirely certain that the Butwins are the same five people found in the burning SUV, investigators are so sure that they’re dead that they aren’t looking for them and believe there are no outstanding suspects.

Robert Kempton, a neighbor of the Butwins, told The Associated Press that the couple had confided in him about going through a divorce and that James Butwin was battling a brain tumor.

A local businessman,  James was a board member of his local synagogue, Temple Emanuel,

Kempton said that after chemotherapy, the tumor returned and that James said late last week that he was discouraged that treatment wasn’t helping him.

Kempton said he and his wife were planning a summer trip to Israel with the Butwins.

“I would have thought that they would have worked through this,” Kempton said, referring to the divorce. “This is a big shock.”

Kempton said he has lived in the well-manicured, upper-middle-class neighborhood for 12 years, and the Butwins moved in a few years afterward.

Yafit Butwin’s Facebook page shows her last post came on Friday — a picture of James, with the three smiling kids and a caption that reads: “Happy birthday, Jim. I am so proud of my three children:) and they know why.”

An attorney for Yafit Butwin, Steven Wolfson, told The Arizona Republic that the Butwins were still living together during the divorce under a temporary agreement to share the home.

Wolfson said that Yafit Butwin immigrated to the US in the mid-1990s from Israel and married Butwin in New Jersey.

“She was looking forward to starting over, and she loved her children very much,” he said.

Wolfson said that Yafit Butwin never sought an order of protection and said there was no hint of domestic violence problems. “This is out of the blue as far as we’re concerned,” he said.

Officials originally believed the car was involved in a smuggling cartel

Sheriff Paul Babeu said Monday that the location of the smoldering SUV in a known smuggling corridor and the nature of the crime itself had him all but certain that a violent smuggling cartel was responsible.

Babeu said that the burned car likely is the same car that a Border Patrol agent saw four hours earlier Saturday when it was still dark.

The agent saw a stopped white Ford Expedition and became suspicious, but when he approached, the vehicle fled and the agent lost it, Babeu said.

When the sun came up, the same agent saw car tracks in the area leading into the desert and shortly after, found a smoldering white Ford Expedition, Babeu said.

When the agent approached the car, he saw four burned bodies lying down in the cab of the vehicle, and one body in the back passenger seat; no one was in the driver’s or front passenger’s seat.