Head in hands, his voice strained, Vincent Mitchell sat outside his little yellow home and tried to make sense of how a family dispute led to a rampage that killed eight people, including the deputy who tried to keep them safe.

“I’m devastated. It don’t seem like it’s real,” Mitchell said shortly after the arrest of his stepson-in-law, Willie Corey Godbolt. “Him and my stepdaughter, they’ve been going back and forth for a couple of years with that domestic violence.”

Godbolt showed up at Mitchell’s home in the southern Mississippi town of Bogue Chitto shortly before midnight Saturday to demand that his estranged wife give up their two children. “She and the kids had been staying with them for about three weeks.”

“He’d come to get his kids. The deputy was called,” and asked him to leave, and it seemed like Godbolt would comply at first, Mitchell said.

“He acted like, motioned like, he was fixing to go. Then he reached in his back pocket and grabbed a gun,” Mitchell said. “He just started shooting everything.”

Mitchell said he escaped along with Godbolt’s wife, but Mitchell’s wife, her sister and one of the wife’s daughters were killed. Also slain was Deputy William Durr, a two-year sheriff’s department veteran and former police officer in nearby Brookhaven, where authorities said Godbolt fled and killed four more people at two other homes.

The bodies of two juvenile males were found at the second location and those of a man and woman were found at the third.

Mississippi Bureau of Investigation spokesman Warren Strain said prosecutors plan to charge Godbolt, 35, with murder, but it’s too soon to say what the motive was. Authorities gave no details on his relationship to the victims, but a member of Godbolt’s church told the AP that everyone but the deputy was related to Godbolt by blood or marriage.

Godbolt himself shed some light on what happened, in an interview he gave to The Clarion-Ledger as he sat with his hands cuffed behind his back on the side of a road in Brookhaven, about 70 miles south of Jackson.

“I was having a conversation with her stepdaddy and her mama and her, my wife, about me taking my children home,” he said. “Somebody called the officer, people that didn’t even live at the house. That’s what they do. They intervene.”

“They cost him his life,” he said, apparently referring to Durr. “I’m sorry.”