Police: Miami piano teacher kills kids, wife, self

Pablo Amador was a “regular dad” who made music with his children and shared his gift teaching kids to play piano. He was a man known for a friendly wave and lending a hand to jump-start a car. And those who knew him say they can’t understand why he apparently shot and killed his two daughters, his wife and then himself.

TV satellite trucks surrounded the gray-trimmed, white ranch home Wednesday as authorities carried out the family, whom police identified as Pablo Josue Amador, 53; his 45-year-old wife, Maria; and their youngest daughters, Prescilla and Rosa, 14 and 13.

A teenage son escaped the shootings uninjured, calling 911 at 5:58 a.m. as he fled the home, police said. Those who saw him regularly along the quiet, modest street of homes could only wonder what happened.

“It confuses me,” said 48-year-old Thelma Vallecillo, whose 13-year-old daughter took piano lessons at the house. “I don’t understand.”

A biography of Amador posted on a Web site advertising his piano classes says he began studying music in Havana and later earned a degree in the United States. The U.S. Copyright Office lists 36 compositions by him and a set of photographs.
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The songs he wrote, many in Spanish, included titles such as “Beautiful Boy” and “Rose of Love,” as well as numerous religious selections.

Sarait Betancourt, a 44-year-old school bus driver who lives near the family, said Amador was a Cuban immigrant who has been giving her two sons, ages 9 and 10, piano lessons at his home once a week since 2006.

“He was a marvelous person and a tremendous professor,” she said. “People would enter the house, and you just breathed peace.”

Amador’s two slain daughters, his 16-year-old son, and a college-age daughter all excelled at piano and performed together at church and home as Los Galileos, Betancourt said. Amador said on his Web site that he produced 13 CDs of his children performing.