Man convicted of 3 murders as teen kills himself in prison

CAMP HILL, Pa. – A man who broke into a classmate’s home in 2007 and stabbed the teenager and his parents to death has killed himself in prison, authorities said Monday.

Cumberland County Deputy Coroner Jeff Miller said Alec Kreider, 25, was found hanging in his cell Friday at the state prison in Camp Hill. The Department of Corrections said staff members tried to revive Kreider after a guard found him unconscious in his cell. He was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Kreider was 16 when Kevin Haines and his parents, Thomas and Lisa Haines, were killed in May 2007. The couple’s daughter, a college student, was awakened by the attacks and escaped unharmed.

Kreider pleaded guilty in June 2008 to first-degree murder and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.

Prosecutors in Lancaster County said Kreider lived with his mother in 2007, and their home was about a 10-minute walk from the home of Kevin, his 10th-grade Manheim Township High School classmate. Kreider was wearing dark clothing and wielding a hunting knife with a four-inch blade when he entered the victims’ suburban Lancaster home through an unlocked door around 2 a.m., prosecutors said. He attacked Kevin’s parents and then the youth in their bedrooms, they said.

The couple’s daughter, a Bucknell University student home that night, awoke to the sounds of a struggle in Kevin’s room and rushed to her parents’ room, where her mortally wounded mother told her to get help. She ran to a neighbour’s home to call police.

Prosecutors read aloud excerpts from a journal Kreider wrote after the slayings expressing a “want/need to kill people” and admitting having “murderous thoughts.”

Told by the judge at his 2008 sentencing that the family and community deserved an explanation, Kreider replied, “There is none.” He told the judge he had received treatment for depression and continued to take medications daily.

Kreider’s father, Tim, told Lancaster newspapers in 2014 that when his son confessed, he “never gave a motive … only said something about Kevin annoying him lately.”