By MONA NAIR
6 News Reporter
KNOXVILLE (WATE) – The Knox County Sheriff's Department has ruled the death of a UT football player's mother and her boyfriend as a murder-suicide.
The preliminary autopsy results reveal Cindy Jo Flanary, 48, was shot once in head by her long-time boyfriend, 50-year-old Alan Ollis.
Deputies say Ollis then took his own life. Flanary is the mother of UT defensive end Daniel Hood.
Deputies say he was the one who discovered the bodies on Wednesday in the couple's bathroom.
Hood says he saw his mother on Sunday. They'd gone to watch a movie together and had a good day. He knew his mom was supposed to head to Kingsport to visit his grandmother a few days after that.
"Come Wednesday I get a call from my grandmother saying she hadn't heard from my mother in a day and a half," said Daniel Hood.
He says when Flanary hadn't been heard from in a few days, he went over to her West Knox County apartment complex.
"I see her car there and it's packed with her personal belongings. So I go upstairs," Hood said.
He says the door to the apartment was locked from the inside and he tried everything to get it open.
"Finally my brother told me I just needed to kick it in and go in. So I kick in the door. I go inside and there was this eerie silence. The whole place was pitch black except the light on in the master bathroom," described Hood.
What the UT football player saw next, he says he'll never forget.
"When I look to the left, that's when I find her body and his body. It's more blood than you can even imagine. It was awful as hell. At that moment I just sprinted outside the house and collapsed outside the doorway. That's when I called police for the first time," Hood said.
He says his mom and Ollis had been through some tough times lately.
"It was a surprise. I know they'd had some rocky times for a while. I never knew it was as bad as it was. I know he got laid off from his job 6 or 8 months ago," Hood said.
He says the hardest part is knowing how much his mother feared guns, and how terrible the last few moments of her life likely felt.
"Honestly, that's probably the worst part of the thing to me. I think they told me she was shot in the head. To think of the fear she had to go through being in that situation, just cripples me," Hood said.
He says when he was younger, he did not have a good relationship with his mother. And now he's dealing with a lot of regret over that lost time with her.
