New Jersey man has pleaded guilty to murdering his parents in their home, more than two years after police found the couple stabbed to death and their son walking away from the house.
Michael Mulgrew, 37, entered guilty pleas March 11 to two counts of murder in Ocean County, where prosecutors said he killed Eugene Mulgrew, 71, and Cheryl Mulgrew, 69, on Nov. 2, 2023. The plea moved the case out of the trial stage and into sentencing, but it did not answer every question that has followed the killings since the day police found blood on the front door of the family’s Lincoln Avenue house. The basic outline is now settled in court. What remains less clear in the public record is how much his reported mental health crisis and drug history may have shaped the hours before the attack.
According to the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, officers were called to the Mulgrew home at about 11 a.m. on Nov. 2, 2023, to assist medical personnel conducting a mobile outreach visit. As officers approached, they saw a man walking away from the residence. At the front door, they noticed what appeared to be blood. Inside, they found blood in several areas of the home. In a bedroom, they found Eugene and Cheryl Mulgrew dead from apparent stab wounds to their upper torsos, with a knife nearby. Prosecutors later said the man seen leaving the home was Michael Mulgrew, who was found not long afterward near West Bay Boulevard and Gunning River Road and taken into custody without incident. Since that day, he has remained jailed in Ocean County.
Later reporting built from the probable cause affidavit gave a fuller account of what happened before officers arrived. Cheryl Mulgrew had contacted police and Mobile Psychiatric Emergency Screening Services the night before, saying her son was having mental health issues and asking for an evaluation. By the time help arrived, he had left the house. She called again around 11 p.m. to say he had returned and was calm, and that the family planned to take him to a doctor the next morning. The next day, according to local reports based on the affidavit, Cheryl again sought help. A neighbor’s Ring camera captured loud screaming from the house at about 10:40 a.m. Not long after, outreach staff and police arrived to a scene that had already become a double homicide investigation. That sequence has remained one of the most haunting parts of the case because it shows the family was actively trying to get help only hours before the killings.
Investigators said Mulgrew later admitted the stabbings began after an argument about household chores. According to the affidavit as described by local news outlets, he told detectives he became angry when asked to help around the house, punched both parents and grabbed a kitchen knife. Authorities said he admitted stabbing his mother in the neck and heart, and said his father was stabbed while trying to protect her. Detectives also said Mulgrew told them he dragged the bodies into a bedroom, took a shower, packed a backpack with a towel, water and a book, and left the house. The prosecutor’s office did not repeat each of those details in its plea announcement, but the plea itself removed any doubt that the state was prepared to prove he was responsible for both deaths. There was no public indication Thursday that the factual basis of the plea had been withdrawn or narrowed.
The family context has made the case especially painful in Barnegat. Eugene and Cheryl Mulgrew were remembered in their obituary as childhood sweethearts who had been married for nearly 50 years. Eugene, known to many as Geno, was also publicly mourned by former co-workers at the Long Beach Island Health Department, where he had worked for decades and was described as generous, warm and deeply committed to public service. Their deaths sent a shock through a shore community that then had to absorb the added detail that the person charged was their own son. In the days after the killings, schools in Barnegat, Stafford and Waretown were locked down while officers searched for him. That quick shift from a welfare response to a homicide case and then to a school lockdown gave the deaths a wider public impact far beyond one household on one block.
The case also carried signs of a deeper crisis inside the home before the attack. Local reports on the affidavit said Mulgrew told detectives he had suffered a drug induced psychosis episode in 2018 while living in Vietnam and had used drugs in the days before the killings. He also reportedly told investigators he believed his family might hurt him and that his mother’s plan to take him for treatment had sent him into what he described as a schizophrenic state. Those claims have remained in the background of the case rather than at its center. They may help explain why Cheryl Mulgrew repeatedly sought emergency psychiatric help, but they have not changed the legal outcome so far. With the guilty plea now entered, the public case is no longer about who committed the killings. It is more about how the court weighs punishment and whether any fuller account of Mulgrew’s mental condition will emerge at sentencing.
That sentencing is set for June 5 before Superior Court Judge Guy P. Ryan. Prosecutors said they will seek two consecutive 30-year prison terms in New Jersey State Prison, with 30 years of parole ineligibility on each count. In practical terms, that means the state is asking for 60 years, with no chance of parole for at least six decades. Because Mulgrew pleaded guilty to murder rather than going to trial, the next court hearing is likely to focus less on what happened inside the house and more on the sentence the judge believes fits the crime. The prosecutor’s office has not publicly said whether family members will speak in court or whether the defense will present mitigation tied to mental illness, substance use or events in the days before the killings. Those are among the last major unanswered points in a case that has otherwise moved sharply toward closure.
The plea did not erase the stark details that first defined the case: blood on the door, a knife near the bodies, and a mother’s failed effort to get help in time. But it did bring a legal turning point. By admitting guilt, Mulgrew spared the state a trial and his parents’ relatives a public replay of the evidence. It also fixed the official record around one central fact that had been alleged since the afternoon of Nov. 2, 2023, when police caught sight of a man leaving the home. The deaths of Eugene and Cheryl Mulgrew are no longer an accusation awaiting proof. They are now a double murder awaiting sentence.
As of Thursday, March 12, Mulgrew had pleaded guilty to both killings and remained jailed ahead of his June 5 sentencing. The next public milestone in the case is whether the judge accepts the state’s request for consecutive prison terms totaling 60 years.