Alabama detectives are unsure if they’re investigating a triple murder or a double murder-suicide after finding a 37-year-old mother and her two children dead inside their Semmes home on Thursday afternoon.

Mobile County Sheriff Paul Burch told WPMI that the children’s father — and Nancy Johnson’s estranged husband — reported finding the bodies.

Burch identified the children as 6-year-old Mia and 2-year-old Jacob and said that Mia appeared to have tried to defend herself.

“I would say she put up a fight,” said Burch.

Burch said the children and Johnson were killed in different manners. He declined to say how they were killed but said the children were not shot, WSFA reported.

“It was more horrific than that,” he said. “I’ll just leave it at that.”

A judge in Utah, where the couple previously lived, granted a protection from abuse order against the husband, Derek Johnson, in August.

A day after the order, Derek Johnson filed for divorce — for the second time this year. He previously filed for divorce in April, WPMI said, but the couple reconciled in June.

According to WSFA, a Mobile County judge on Tuesday awarded custody of the children to both parents, although he ordered that the state Department of Human Resources be given “protectives supervision” of them.

Judge Walter Honeycutt gave the parents alternate weeks with the children beginning October 1 and ordered the husband to retrieve a trailer from out of state, which was to be used by one parent while the other lived in the house with the children.

Derek Johnson was reportedly living in that trailer in the backyard on Thursday.

The estranged husband remained on the scene after calling 911 and is cooperating, Burch said, according to WPMI. Semmes Police Chief Todd Freind, however, said that his department had been called to the home “numerous times for domestics” and that Nancy Johnson had “called numerous times concerned for her children’s welfare.”

Derek Johnson was arrested earlier this year for violating the protection from abuse order, Freind said.

Neighbors told WPMI they knew the couple was not getting along.

“They both told me they were going through a divorce, and it was getting ugly and all that. I didn’t know it would go to this,” said neighbor Rick Hamilton.

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[Featured image: WPMI screenshot]