The message arrived quietly around 4 o’clock in the morning, pinging the phones of friends and family members who were asleep.
“I’m dead. You should probably call 911,” read the text from Andre Zeitler.
He sent one message to a small group chat of longtime friends and another to his father. No one was immediately alarmed or called for help.
The message felt like Andre’s dark humor. Shocking, performative and impossible to take seriously. In hindsight, it was the most urgent of cries. He had made a decision.
The single-story, stucco-lined house on Cypress Lane was quiet April 9. None of the neighbors heard anything to raise alarm in the quiet Desert Cedars neighborhood.
Inside, there was a handwritten warning on the door, attached to a moving box: “WARNING: GORE AHEAD. 3 DEAD. 2 HUMAN. 1 CAT.”
It was the beginning of a grim discovery, one that would reveal the deeply troubled final hours of Zeitler, a relatively young man grappling with mental illness, financial uncertainty and the weight of caring for his ailing mother.
These details come from newly released case files, as the investigation ends. Zeitler acted alone in this violent murder-suicide, police concluded. The following details are stitched together through newly released police reports, witness interviews and suicide notes left behind.
Zeitler was aged 40 and the full-time caretaker for his mother, Diane, as she battled multiple sclerosis and the chronic health issues that came with it.
Friends described Zeitler as generous, deeply sensitive and always thoughtful. A local software engineer turned full-time caregiver, he quietly took on a world of responsibility while struggling with his own internal demons.
“This was a mental health crisis that turned tragic,” Ladonda Calloway, a close friend, told InMaricopa at the time. “He was not a killer. He was a very kind person.”
Zeitler had recently been laid off from his job as a programmer for Ziff Davis. Since then, he had launched a YouTube project centered around his beloved cat, Jake, and even registered a new business, Lazy Quality LLC, in December. Friends said he had purchased new video equipment and was excited about the project, although the video editing process frustrated him.
“We went out for his birthday, and he seemed like he found something to pour his energy into,” his close friend Christina Gilchrist told InMaricopa in April. “He showed us the videos he was working on … [he] was generous and thoughtful and kind. If there was something I was into, he paid attention. He gave everything. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Friends told police that Zeitler stopped taking his prescribed medications for depression and anxiety, instead increasing his marijuana use.
Zeitler didn’t talk about suicide directly, but often made what friends called “weird comments,” according to summarized statements to police. Still, even after receiving his cryptic text, no one called 911 right away. When they tried to get more context to what they believed to be a joke, Zeitler never responded. There were no read receipts on the text thread like usual. Nothing came back.
At 10:30 a.m. April 9, a friend named Kayla agreed to stop by and check on Andre. She knocked, but there was no answer.
On the phone with other friends, Kayla circled the house. The backyard gate was unlocked. She peeked into a garden shed where Zeitler sometimes smoked weed. It was empty.
Still on the phone, Kayla walked to the front door. She opened the storm door and gently tested the main handle. The front door was unlocked.
Kayla stepped in and stopped. She was the first to read that handwritten warning taped to a moving box just inside the entrance. A kindness from her friend, sparing her the worst of it.
Kayla backed out of the house and called the police.
Twenty minutes later, officers were inside the home piecing together what had happened.
They found Zeitler in the master bedroom, dead from a gunshot wound. A 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M&P shotgun was laid across his chest. Hearing protection partially covered his ears. That beloved cat, Jake, lay beside him, also killed by a gunshot wound to the face.
A single spent shell lay on the floor near the bed. Three more were found around the house.
In a smaller bedroom near the kitchen, officers found Diane Zeitler, 64. She had been shot in the head. The wound was catastrophic.
Aside from the warning on the door, four other suicide notes were found inside.
One on the kitchen counter read “Mom died in her sleep… She’ll never know what I did. No one else cared for her.”
One justified the killing of his cat: “He wouldn’t understand why I was gone.”
The other explained his suicide, citing depression, distrust and “world issues.”
Andre Zeitler’s father, Dale Zietler, told police that the two recently fought over politics. It became so heated that Andre threatened to block his father’s phone number.
“We had argued a few weeks ago, about politics, of all things,” Dale Zeitler said, according to police. “He told me not to contact him anymore. I didn’t think he meant it.”
Police found a receipt for the shotgun, which was purchased in Chandler just six weeks earlier.
Those closest to Andre are still trying to make sense of what happened. They remember a man who showed up for others, who gave thoughtful gifts, who brought joy.
“He leaves a huge hole in my family,” said Gilchrist. “This is just so super shocking and sad.”
“I want to remember the person he was,” she added, “not the person he decided to be.”
Friends hoped to create some type of memorial to honor Andre Zeitler’s life and to raise awareness about mental health.
