NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – A former New Hampshire man whose wife and mother were shot to death on New Year’s Day says the women might still be alive if foster care officials had acted sooner.

William Clark said the eldest of the two foster children charged in the slayings – James Earl Garrett, 17, and Jeffery Byrd Johnson Jr., 15 – had asked to be moved from the family’s home in White Bluff, about 25 miles west of Nashville in Dickson County.

A meeting had been arranged with officials from the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services and the foster care contract agency, Phoenix Homes. But before it could occur, Clark’s wife, Mary Clark, 39, and his mother, 66-year-old Gail Clark, were killed in the home.

“They have 15 days to get people together – this counselor and that counselor – on request,” William Clark said by phone Thursday. “The policy is 15 days. If he had been removed in a 24-hour period, they might be alive.”

DCS spokesman Rob Johnson declined to go into specifics of the case because of the law, but he said that when there is a request for relocation, the department tries to convene a meeting of everyone with an interest in the child’s well-being within 15 days.

The process is expedited if there is a safety issue, Johnson said, but in general DCS is cautious about relocating foster children because of the disruption it can cause the child.

So far, DCS’s internal review of the case has found no sign that anyone was in danger, Johnson said.

“The case worker has been in the home for many months and as far as we know things were running smoothly. There was good contact between the foster home, DCS, the case manager and the contract agency,” he said. “Right now, DCS is not seeing any red flags.”

Both boys are charged with first-degree murder and are being held at the Williamson County Juvenile Detention Facility. A detention hearing is scheduled for Friday in Dickson County.

According to Clark, Garrett wanted to leave the home because he had been called racial slurs by some other kids. He had been living there about a month, while Johnson had been there four or five months.

“Jeffery loved Mary,” Clark said. “James we didn’t know. There was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. He was too quiet.”

One of the boys – authorities aren’t saying which one but Clark says it was Johnson – called 911 to report the killings.

“I don’t know how involved Jeffery is, but if I was a 14-year-old kid and I’d just watched two people get murdered and the trigger man was holding the gun – what are you going to do?” Clark said.

Neither teen has a history of violence, and Clark is at a loss to explain a motive. He said his mother, who was visiting from Orange, Mass., discovered about $250 dollars missing from her pocketbook earlier that day and that that could have had something to do with it.

A truck driver, Clark was in Maine when he learned of the slayings. He said he drove back 1,400 miles and cleaned the blood himself.

He and his wife moved to Tennessee from Alton, N.H., a couple of years ago, said The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, Mass.

Gail Clark’s son Bruce Clark Jr., has lived in Salem, N.H. for five years with his longtime girlfriend, Cheri Demers. Demers said the family is doing OK considering the circumstances.

“They were both very nice people. Not a mean bone in any one of their bodies,” Demers, Clark’s girlfriend of 20 years, told The Eagle-Tribune. “They’d give you the shirts off their back.”

They operated a facility that provided therapeutic care to children with behavior or emotional history, but they were only in the custody of the two teenagers at the time of the shootings.

William Clark, 50, says he’ll stay in Tennessee but probably won’t take in foster children anymore.

“The worst part is that they’re gone,” he said of his wife and mother. “But the next worse part was cleaning the mess up. I don’t wish that on anybody.”

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Information from: Eagle Tribune, http://www.eagletribune.com

AP-ES-01-03-08 1917EST

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