Four People Were Found Dead in Two Houses on One Street in Houma, Louisiana. A Boy Was Airlifted Out. The Man Arrested Sunday Was Acquitted of Attempted Murder in 2023.

A 47-year-old man with a two-decade arrest record is in custody in Houma, Louisiana, after four people were stabbed to death and a child was critically wounded in two homes on the same street Saturday night, the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's Office said Sunday.

Deputies were first called to the 200 block of Ashland Drive on a report of a stabbing. They found a juvenile with what officials described as "extremely significant" wounds; the boy was airlifted to a hospital outside the area. As deputies searched the surrounding homes, they found four more victims, all dead, inside nearby residences. Houma sits about 55 miles southwest of New Orleans in the bayou country of Terrebonne Parish, and by Saturday night the sheriff's office had named Kaegan Jude Solet, 47, of Houma, as a person of interest and asked the public for help finding him.

The search ended early Sunday, when Solet was arrested near the neighborhood, according to the sheriff's office and local reports. Lt. Blake Tabor, a sheriff's spokesman, said the killings were not "random" and that there "is a link" between Solet and the victims, though he declined to describe it. Authorities have not released the names or ages of the dead or said how they were related to one another or to the injured child. "We're using every investigative tool that we have," Tabor said. Of the boy, he said Sunday: "He is in critical condition but stable. We do believe that he will pull through, but again, this is a day-to-day thing." No formal charges in the killings had been announced as of Sunday evening.

Solet's history with the parish's criminal justice system is long and, in two instances, ended without a conviction. In January 2019, the sheriff's office obtained a warrant charging him with second-degree murder in the death of 41-year-old Kemple Paul Scott Lovell, who was found slain on Jan. 9 of that year; the charge was dropped after a grand jury declined to indict him. That December, on Christmas Eve, he was arrested again after a 59-year-old woman was found on the floor of a room at the Red Carpet Inn motel in Houma with numerous stab wounds. Prosecutors charged him with attempted second-degree murder and accused him of striking her with a wine bottle and stabbing her repeatedly before leaving her locked inside. In November 2023, a jury deliberated about two hours and found him not guilty. In 2025, according to NBC News, he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced to six months with credit for time served. His arrests date to 1997.

Asked about how those earlier cases were handled, Tabor said he could not speak to the decisions of prosecutors and juries. What the sheriff's office could say Sunday was that the man it had been hunting since Saturday night was no longer at large, and that the investigation into what happened inside the two houses on Ashland Drive, and why, was continuing. The parish coroner has not yet released the identities of the four victims.