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100 year old man kills wife new jersey, Three months ago, Rosalia Juskin dialed 911 from behind a locked basement door. She said her husband, Michael, 100, was ignoring her pleas, so she asked the police for help opening the door. When they arrived, Ms. Juskin, 88, described the episode as an accident.

It was the third time in three years that the police had been called to the couple’s home at 58 Spruce Street. Not seeing any obvious threat, they left, and then notified adult protective services. “He’s 100 years old, and she chalked it up to that,” the Elmwood Park police chief, Michael Foligno, said. “She didn’t feel it was purposeful.”

On Sunday, Mr. Juskin killed his wife with an ax in her bed as she slept. Then he took a knife into the bathroom and killed himself by cutting his wrists, said John L. Molinelli, the Bergen County prosecutor. A relative found the couple’s bloodied bodies the next day.

National experts in crimes of the elderly said that Mr. Juskin’s actions made him among the oldest killers in the country’s recent history.

The crime tore asunder a relationship that had been unraveling in recent years, pulled at again and again by the erratic and occasionally aggressive behavior of a man who showed signs of mental deterioration, the authorities said. Those who heard the cries for help said they either understood the tumult as a symptom of old age, or lacked the resources to intervene.Basically, you have two elderly people sort of starting to lose their faculties, not any type of criminal behavior,” Chief Foligno said, adding that Ms. Juskin had not shown signs of serious illness. “There’s nothing else you could have done or foreseen that a murder would happen.”

That visit by the Police Department’s to the Juskins’ two-story brick and clapboard home in January was the most peculiar of three they had made in recent years.

In March 2012, they responded to a 911 call and found Mr. Juskin showing “erratic, dementia-type behavior,” Chief Foligno said, and so officers took him to the hospital.

A year and a half later, they found Mr. Juskin berating his wife over her cooking and other matters, Chief Foligno said. The argument spilled into what Ms. Juskin described to the police as harassment. Not having seen evidence of violence, the officers left again, the chief said.

Behind the bursts of anger was an increasingly anxious man taken by the notion of breaking free of his marriage of decades, neighbors said. The couple had lived on Spruce Street since Elmwood Park had been called East Paterson and Spruce Street had been mostly farmland, raising two sons and a daughter. In recent years, Mr. Juskin busied himself by walking around the block for exercise and mowing his lawn.

But about a month ago, he knocked on the door of a neighbor across the street, Alejandra Gonzalez. Mr. Juskin, she said, was adamant that he needed a ride to Paterson to see a lawyer about getting a divorce.

“He was very unhappy; he thought his wife was taking his pension money,” Ms. Gonzalez, 24, said. “He might have thought she was cheating on him.”

As a favor to the frail man, her fiancé gave him the ride. Mr. Juskin reported on the way back that he had been counseled to forget his grievances.

“The divorce lawyer said he was elderly and said he should let it go and just enjoy the rest of his life,” Ms. Gonzalez said.

Mr. Juskin apparently disagreed. He soon knocked again, asking for another ride to see the lawyer. He claimed to be only 93. This time Ms. Gonzalez told one of Mr. Juskin’s sons.

“The son said, ‘He does this all the time; just don’t do it anymore,’” meaning do not take him to the lawyer, Ms. Gonzalez said.

Reached at his home in nearby Woodland Park, Mr. Juskin’s oldest son, George Juskin, told a reporter, “I can’t help you, bud.”

Speaking in general terms, Karen Roberto, director of the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech, said that in many cases of elderly domestic abuse, people fastened to a home and a lifetime partner ignored the danger. As long as they can make their own decisions, relatives and public officials are left with little recourse.

“We find that women often don’t leave because they feel responsible or guilty to take care of their partner or spouse who might have physical or cognitive problems,” Dr. Roberto said.

The deficits in care have been accentuated in recent years by fraying social services, said Maria Aberasturi, the social work supervisor at Bergen County Adult Protective Services.

She declined to address the police chief’s statement that the agency had been notified of Mr. Juskin’s condition, citing patient privacy. But she said that the state set a high bar for adult social workers’ intervening, meaning that some people might not receive the care they need. “Competent people have the right to make bad choices,” she said.

On top of that, medical help has become more scarce. Ms. Aberasturi cited inattention to the behavioral consequences of diseases like dementia and stagnant state support for adult protective services.

The agency has had to shrink its staff because the state has rarely increased its budget, she said. Meanwhile, propelled by aging baby boomers, Bergen County’s caseload has grown around 10 percent a year, meaning the agency must handle about 850 referrals with a budget of roughly $475,000.

Darrell Steffensmeier, a professor of sociology and criminology at Pennsylvania State University, said Mr. Juskin was the oldest killer whom he had come across in decades of studying age and crime. Federal Bureau of Investigation data show that only 0.6 percent of murder offenders in 2013 were 75 or older.

“You can’t prevent every tragedy,” Ms. Aberasturi said, “but if the systems were different, could this have turned out differently?”