Melanie Hyer, her two daughters and the children’s father were found stabbed to death Tuesday night inside a Doral home, a grim discovery that investigators believe was part of a murder-suicide. Police found the four bodies during a welfare check in the gated Doral Isles neighborhood near Northwest 111th Court and Northwest 72nd Terrace, and all four were pronounced dead at the scene.
The case is drawing attention because the people inside that home were not strangers to one another. Hyer was 46, Savannah Whiten was 11, Sienna Whiten was 8 and Ryan Charles Whiten was 42. Sources said Hyer and Whiten were divorced and co-parenting their children, and that both had remarried and later divorced those spouses. Officials have not said what led investigators to treat the deaths as an apparent murder-suicide, and they have not confirmed how long the bodies were inside the home.
Hyer had spent more than two decades in South Florida real estate and built a career around luxury waterfront properties, estate sales and guardianship cases. She started at Keller Williams Realty before joining Pro Estate Realty in 2022. Over the course of her work, she sold more than 1,000 properties across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties, and her largest recorded residential sale closed in March for $3.1 million at 7945 Sunset Drive in Miami.
The killings also shattered a school community that knew the two girls well. Neighbors said the children were outside riding bikes with their father on Sunday, then were found dead with him and their mother days later. The girls attended Downtown Doral Academy and played field hockey, and head of schools Jeannette Acevedo-Isenberg said both students were deeply loved by their school, their teachers and their peers.
Doral Mayor Christi Frag called the deaths an unimaginable tragedy as the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office took over the investigation. The unanswered question now is not who died or where, but what happened inside that home before Tuesday night’s welfare check brought the case into view.
