Steven Eric Kirchner, 64, a White male, was found dead alongside his wife, Elizabeth Lee Kirchner, 53, after deputies performed a welfare check at their home at 29 Saunders Avenue in the Cardinal Court Mobile Home Park in Largo on Friday, June 6, 2025. Deputies arrived around 12:35 p.m. and discovered both victims in the living room with apparent gunshot wounds, after an employer reported that one of them had not shown up for work.
The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office opened a double-homicide investigation and identified a family member as the focus almost immediately.
Detectives soon named the couple’s son, 37-year-old Nicholas Steven Kirchner, as the suspect. According to investigators, he had already fled Florida by the time deputies arrived. In the hours following the killings, he allegedly pointed a gun at people in Sumter County, South Carolina—at one point holding a family member at gunpoint—and said, “I’ve already killed two people – I’ll kill some more.” Authorities later located him in Georgia, where he was taken into custody after a motorist reported a man praying on the roadside; during arrest and subsequent interviews, he allegedly referred to the murders of his parents as “righteous kills.”
By June 7–9, 2025, officials confirmed his arrest in Georgia on a Florida warrant. He faced two counts of premeditated first-degree murder in Pinellas County, with extradition pending. Local and regional reports noted that he had confessed to the killings and outlined the multistate sequence that followed the Largo crime scene, from South Carolina threats to the Georgia apprehension. The Sheriff’s Office press release and multiple news outlets corroborated the victims’ identities, the Saunders Avenue address, the welfare-check timeline, and the charges against the suspect.
