If this does not count as completely avoidable tragedy, I don’t know what does. Washington Post:
SAN ANTONIO — A Texas woman who for months was unable to qualify for food stamps pulled a gun in a state welfare office and staged a seven-hour standoff with police that ended with her shooting her two children before killing herself, officials said Tuesday.
The children, a 10-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, remained in critical condition Tuesday. …
…
[Texas Dept. of HHS spokesperson] Goodman didn’t know what Grimmer specifically failed to provide. In addition to completing an 18-page application, families seeking state benefits also must provide documents proving their information, such as proof of employment and residency.
…
“We were still waiting, and if we had that, I don’t know if she would still qualify or not,” Goodman said.
…
Ms. Grimmer and her two children were taken into a room by a caseworker. Grimmer revealed a gun and the standoff began. I’ll spare you the details of the shooting, only the conclusion:
…
… Inside, they found Grimmer’s body and her two wounded children.
The children were “very critical” and unconscious when taken from the scene, [Laredo PD Officer] Baeza said.
…
It is notoriously difficult to apply for and obtain any social service from the State of Texas. The caseworkers are not to blame here: a solidly Republican legislature and governor for decades, coupled with re-re-redistricting designed to maintain that status in perpetuity, assures that obtaining state aid or state-moderated federal aid in Texas is as arduous as anywhere in the United States.
Yes, this woman was tragically mentally unstable. Who knows if she would or would not have qualified for food stamps… in Texas, an answer of “no” would be a good bet. But either way, a woman is dead and two children hang by a thread, mostly because of how poverty is regarded by TPTB in Texas. My heart aches.
•
AFTERTHOUGHT: This evening, in the parking lot of the grocery store which is my early voting location, a woman about 35 years old or so asked me for money so she could put up her two sons, ages 2 and 6, at a motel tonight. I gave her $20, based on what I had in my pocket and what I expected she could gather in that parking lot, balanced by the regrettably real possibility that she would use the money to get high tonight instead of for lodging or food for her children. But I could not forget the expression on the face of my late father decades ago, when he explained to me about such donations: he said yes, the person may just be handing you a line… but what if they’re genuinely hungry, or really are facing a freezing night out in the weather? Many times I saw my Dad reach for a couple of dollars (a lot of money in those days) to give to someone whose best hope otherwise was to be arrested for vagrancy. We really, really need to accommodate the victims of misfortune in this society. Too often, instead, we merely compound their misfortune. “The rich get rich and the poor get poorer,” or else die sleeping on the sidewalk in the freezing rain. Will we ever, as a society, decide “enough is enough”?