Urbandale Police Sergeant Gary Lang.
Urbandale Police Sergeant Gary Lang has confirmed the man who carried out a murder-suicide over the weekend is a former Des Moines Police officer who was facing a prison sentence.
Officers were called late Sunday morning by the family of 32-year-old Mersed Dautovic and were asked to do a “welfare check” at his apartment in Urbandale.
They found Dautovic and 24-year-old Mevlida Dzananovic dead inside a detached garage. “Mevlida’s preliminary cause of death was strangulation and Merced’s was self-inflicted strangulation,” Lang said at a news conference today.
Urbandale Police Sergeant Gary Lang talks with the media.
Dautovic and Dzananovic had been romantically involved, but it’s unclear if they were currently dating. “They had been in a relationship,” Lang said. “There had been some domestic issues in the past between the two.”
Lang refused to describe exactly how the murder-suicide was carried out or release much more information about the case. “I know the detectives are still working…so, I can’t really answer,” Lang said.
Dautovic was a Des Moines Police officer until 2008, when he was convicted of excessive force and obstruction of justice charges for the beating of a man during a traffic stop. He spent just under two years in prison for the crime, but a federal appeals court ruled the sentence was too lenient and he was scheduled to be re-sentenced today.