Houston restaurant owners, two children found dead in suspected murder-suicide

Houston police were called to a River Oaks home in the 2100 block of Kingston Street near Avalon Place at about 5:26 p.m. Monday after the family’s babysitter and one of the victims’ sisters said they had not heard from them since Sunday night. Officers arrived about 10 minutes later and found four people dead inside.

Investigators believe the deaths were a murder-suicide. Police said evidence at the scene suggests Matthew Mitchell shot the three victims before killing himself, but detectives were still working to establish the exact timeline and the last time the family was seen or heard from. The adults were identified as Matthew Mitchell, 52, and Thy Mitchell, 39. The children were 8 and 4 years old.

The killings have hit Houston’s restaurant community hard because Matthew and Thy Mitchell were the owners of Traveler’s Table on Westheimer Road and Traveler’s Cart on Montrose Boulevard. Restaurant employees confirmed the couple’s deaths, and the Mitchells had been named 2025 Restaurateurs of the Year by the Houston Chapter of the Texas Restaurant Association. Their businesses gave the family a public profile that extended well beyond River Oaks and Montrose.

The couple’s biographies show two different paths that converged in Houston hospitality. Matthew Mitchell studied at Emory University, studied in France, Italy and at Oxford in England, and worked as a writer and journalist in London, Paris and New York before moving into pharmaceutical and clinical research and later opening a restaurant. Thy Mitchell grew up in Houston in a first-generation Vietnamese-American family, worked in her grandmother’s and mother’s restaurant as a child, studied at the University of Houston, earned a master’s degree from Penn State and later worked in restaurant operations and human resources.

Neighbors told KHOU the family had not lived in the home long, a detail that added to the shock in a section of River Oaks where violent calls of this scale are rare. Houston Police Department investigators are still piecing together how a household that appeared private from the outside ended in the deaths of two adults and two children, and whether there were any missed signs before the welfare check brought officers to the door.