Bruce Strange, a 52-year-old White man, died on June 6, 2014, after a violent domestic shooting in the parking lot of a Kroger shopping center on Dallas Highway near Due West Road in the Marietta area of west Cobb. Police said the killing unfolded in the early evening, just after 5:30 p.m., in a place that had been part of an ordinary Friday routine for shoppers and families, before it suddenly turned into a crime scene ringed with tape and watched over by stunned witnesses.
Investigators said the shooting grew out of a domestic dispute between Bruce Strange and his wife, Paula Strange, 54, of Kennesaw. Witnesses told reporters the two had been arguing, and one account described Bruce outside near the sidewalk while Paula was in a Honda Element. As the confrontation escalated, witnesses said he was heard pleading with her not to do it. Police said she fired at him, then pursued him as he tried to get away, apparently moving toward the front of the store, possibly to seek help. Authorities said she shot him several times before turning the gun on herself.
Both Bruce Strange and Paula Strange died at the scene. In the first hours after the shooting, police treated the case as a murder-suicide tied to a domestic breakdown. Reports that followed added more of the personal wreckage behind the violence: court records showed Paula Strange had filed for divorce in May 2014, only weeks before the shooting. Kennesaw State University, where she had worked for more than a decade in research compliance, later issued condolences after she was publicly identified.
As for suspects, the only suspect publicly identified in the case was Paula Strange, who authorities said shot and killed her husband before killing herself. Because the suspected shooter died at the scene, there was no arrest, no prosecution, and no later trial or conviction. The case appears to have ended as a closed murder-suicide investigation, with Bruce Strange’s death remembered not as an unsolved mystery but as the final, devastating end of a domestic conflict that erupted in full view of the public.
