Just weeks after Nimisha Tiwari took the lives of her children and herself, another mother in the Chicago area decided to take the most desperate of ways out of an apparently messy divorce. Magdalene Kamysz, 28, of Crystal Lake, Illinois, committed suicide on Tuesday by stepping in front of a commuter train near her home. But if that wasn’t sad enough, when police went to her home four hours later to notify relatives, they found her 7-year-old daughter, Sydney, suffocated in her locked bedroom. While nothing was left behind to indicate why Kamysz took such drastic measures, the back story is eerily familiar:

One focus of the inquiry is an ongoing legal battle that Magdalene was waging with Sydney’s father over custody and visitation issues.

“It has been a somewhat heated and contested situation,” Nygren said.

Sydney’s father, 29-year-old Alan Burton of Walworth, Wis., filed a civil suit in February seeking to formalize his visitation rights with the girl, which his attorney said had been disrupted earlier.

But despite how contentious their relationship might have been, it’s hard to contemplate how it could lead to murdering your only child. These feelings don’t just come out of nowhere, why didn’t she seek some help? I guess we’ll never find out.

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