Santa Barbara County police opened fire and killed a person suspected to be connected to the stabbing of Ron Ely’s wife on Tuesday night.
Ron Ely, 81, former “Tarzan” actor in the 1960s, was unharmed.
TMZ reported that law enforcement sources told them that Ely’s wife of 35 years, Valerie Lundeen, was the victim.
According to ABC7, the deputies found the elderly woman dead and then encountered the suspect inside the house.
Neighbors were then told to stay in their homes and lock their doors.
Multiple gunshots can be heard in the news outlet’s video, which says the suspect was killed.
Valerie Lundeen was former Miss Florida and was 62. They had 3 children together.
However, CBS Los Angeles reported that an unnamed, disabled elderly man was taken into the hospital in unknown condition.
Deputies said that they don’t believe Ely was involved in the shooting.
Ely also had played in “The Love Boat,” “Wonder Woman,” and a restaging of “Sea Hunt.” He hosted the Miss America pageant in the 1980s.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
