UNEXPLAINED DEATHS STUN NEIGHBORS

CHRISTINA GOSTOMSKI

The Morning Call

A day after Rita Mensinger and her 11-year-old adopted daughter Chelsea were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide, family and neighbors struggled to understand what went wrong.

`I'm heartbroken for the little girl,` neighbor Tammy Hobar said Saturday. `We used to see her go down the hill in the van with her mom, but that was all. I hardly ever saw her. I never saw her play with the other kids in the neighborhood.`

Rita Mensinger, her husband, Charles, and Chelsea, who was also Rita Mensinger's biological granddaughter, made their home on the top of a small hill overlooking Second Street in Cementon, Whitehall Township.

The house was only accessible by a gravel road, and neighbors said the family seldom ventured down to socialize.

It was in that house that around 8 p.m. on Sept. 15 that Rita Mensinger, 57, allegedly shot her husband and then fled in the family van with Chelsea. After lying bleeding for several hours, Charles Mensinger, 49, struggled into his tractor-trailer, drove to a neighbor's home and blasted the rig's horn for help. The phone lines in the Mensinger home had been disconnected.

Charles Mensinger was released from St. Luke's Hospital in Fountain Hill on Friday, the same day the bodies of his wife and Chelsea were discovered at the Petro Truck Stop on Route 315 in Dupont, Luzerne County.

Chelsea was found sitting in a back seat, shot in the front of the head. Her mother was found lying in the rear of the van with a .357 caliber Magnum handgun next to her.

Autopsy results are scheduled to be released Monday.

`I'm not sure how long they were there,` Luzerne County District Attorney David Lupas said Saturday. He said the trucker who discovered the bodies said he first saw the van on Wednesday, and another witness reported seeing the vehicle on Monday.

Lupas would not comment on reports that a note was found in the van.

At Whitehall-Coplay Middle School, where Chelsea just started the sixth grade, Principal Robert Rothenberger said the staff is `deeply saddened by the tragedy.`

A crisis management team has met to discuss Chelsea's death, and district counselors and psychologists will be available to talk to pupils Monday, Rothenberger said.

He said Chelsea, who has attended school in the district since kindergarten, was `a very friendly and well-liked sixth-grader.`

`She was extremely excited about starting sixth grade in the middle school. It was an exciting time,` he said.

Reached by phone at his Walnutport home, Rita Mensinger's son, Ken Dunbar, said he has talked to his stepfather since he was released from the hospital and that physically `he's doing fine.`

Dunbar would not say where Charles Mensinger is staying, and neighbors said Saturday that they had not seen him since the Sept. 15 shooting.

Dunbar declined to discuss the shooting or his mother's death and would not divulge details about the family or Chelsea's biological parents.

`I don't think I want to talk about this right now,` he said. `It's really a bad time.`

Hobar said neighbors are still shocked about what happened.

`You think you know your neighborhood, and then something like this happens,` she said. `This was a quiet, working-class neighborhood.`

Contact Christina Gostomski

610-820-6585

christina.gostomski@mcall.com