(LifeSiteNews) — An 18 year-old Arizona man murdered his pregnant girlfriend in escalating anger that was reportedly due to her refusal to kill their child through abortion.

Michael Sanchez killed his girlfriend, 16-year-old Rylee Montgomery, and shot another 17-year-old pregnant girl as well as a 22-year-old woman on Thursday evening.

“He sent her a picture of himself with a gun pointed at his head and a text telling her ‘I’m going to get you and then I’m going to take care of myself,’” Amy Montgomery, Rylee’s stepmother, told local outlet AZFamily. “So she called the Avondale Police and told them, added it to the report and that was the last I heard from her. Then three hours later, she was gone.”

A GoFundMe page published by Amy Montgomery says that Sanchez “started off very sweet and nice” to Rylee, but “once he got her pregnant in February, it was all over.”

Amy recounted to the Arizona Republic, “She didn’t want to have an abortion. She said, ‘I’m going to keep my baby.’ He had other plans for her.”

“After telling her to ‘kill the baby,’ and when she refused, he turned his anger on her, threatening her numerous times. He even went so far as to choke her at our house,” wrote Montgomery. “When she broke up with him in March, he decided to point a gun at her face and told her she wasn’t allowed.”

Amy said that after Sanchez threatened Rylee on Thursday, he drove 20 miles to where she was hanging out with her friends, and shot them all. Her pregnant friend Abby “was shot in the back and nearly bled out, forced to deliver her baby boy at 25 weeks,” and all three are in the intensive care unit (ICU), according to Amy. Rylee died at the scene, according to the Buckeye Police Department.

At the time of the shooting, Sanchez was reportedly wearing an ankle monitor due to a previous charge of fleeing from police after a road rage crash while he was on his way to confront Rylee, according to Amy.

Sanchez is being held in a Maricopa County jail on two counts of first-degree murder, as well as a count of endangerment and of interference with a monitor device. The death of Rylee’s baby is considered a murder under Arizona law.

Rylee was 14 weeks pregnant but did not know that she was having a baby girl, according to Amy, who learned of the baby’s gender only after Rylee was killed.

Amy said that her family contacted Buckeye and Avondale police more than once before the murder because Sanchez kept threatening to kill Rylee.

“(Rylee) said, ‘I’m going to do my best to raise my baby.’ And it’s just heartbreaking because we tried to get her out, and (police) told me to get a restraining order,” Amy told local media.

She and Rylee’s father say police in Avondale recommended seeking an order of protection against Sanchez.

Avondale police spokesman Officer Daniel Benavidez reportedly wrote in a May 16 email that Rylee said that Sanchez had pointed a firearm at her but that investigators did not find sufficient evidence. 

The stepmother also believes that Sanchez intentionally tried to kill Rylee’s pregnant friend Abby because she had been trying to convince Rylee to break up with him.

Sadly, Rylee’s mother was recently incapacitated after suffering a car accident along with Rylee and her brother. Amy said Rylee was driving them when someone t-boned them, reportedly distracted by the Hazen Fire in Buckeye. The mother is working toward walking again.