A family of Camassa-Holm type equations with a linear term and cubic and quartic nonlinearities is considered. Local well-posedness results are established via Kato's approach. Conserved quantities for the equation are determined and from them we prove that the energy functional of the solutions is a time-dependent, monotonically decreasing function of time, and bounded from above by the Sobolev norm of the initial data under some conditions. The existence of wave breaking phenomenon is investigated and necessary conditions for its existence are obtained. In our framework the wave breaking is guaranteed, among other conditions, when the coefficient of the linear term is sufficiently small, which allows us to interpret the equation as a linear perturbation of some recent Camassa-Holm type equations considered in the literature.