Although there is a bit more than a week to go before Christmas, it is certainly one of the saddest stories of a somber and subdued Holiday Season.
It made headlines across the Country and overseas when 38-year-old Rachelle Grimmer ended a hostage stand-off in a Laredo, Texas welfare office by shooting herself and her two children, Ramie, 12 and Timothy, 10. Rachelle Grimmer died at the scene while Ramie and Timothy died after being removed from life support at a San Antonio hospital.
They are beautiful children. In photos taken before the divorce they are happy pre-schoolers posed in a studio portrait before a sylvan backdrop of trees and tire swings and in front of their beaming parents; a stark contrast to the candid photos first printed with the news stories that show the children, still beautiful, the boy as handsome as any tween idol but with eyes that seem too old for his age and a fuzzy picture of a little girl with long blond hair, caught in the moment but still guarded.
After Rachelle and Dale Grimmer divorced over six years ago, Rachelle moved from Montana to Ohio with the children. Dale also moved to Ohio to be close to his children. What he observed both in Ohio and Montana worried him and he tried, and failed to gain custody and both he and his mother reported their concerns to authorities in both States. Rachelle responded by taking the children and fleeing the State.
In June, 2010, Rachelle Grimmer walked into a Corpus Christi police station and filed a report alleging that her ex-husband was affiliated with the KKK and a gang known as “MS13” and that members of those groups were stalking her. As she spoke to an officer it was noted that Ms. Grimmer, “became more edgy and paranoid,” she refused to believe the uniformed deputy taking the report was really a police officer and became “abusive” when the officer asked to see her driver’s license.
The deputy wrote in the report that it was that Ms. Grimmer, “may be mentally challenged,” and noted concern for the children due to their mother’s “obvious mental issues,” but that concern apparently wasn’t acted upon.
Later in 2010, Rachelle Grimmer and her children were found living in a tent on a beach in Corpus Christi, Texas. Authorities investigated after receiving calls from people concerned about the children. Kleberg County Deputy Sherriff, Robert Wright, was dispatched to investigate but Rachelle Grimmer convinced him that she and her children were vacationing from New York and taking part in, “a learning experience.”
Grimmer showed Officer Wright a small cooler full of bread and sandwich meat along with $700 in food stamps from Ohio and told him she received $500 a month in child support. She told him the children bathed “in the bay” and cleaned up at a local gas station. She also had a gun which she claimed she had for “personal protection” while traveling.
Officer Wright gave the gun back to Rachelle Grimmer and reported the situation to the local child welfare office who sent an investigator out to the campsite the very next day. Grimmer told the investigator that she and the children were vacationing from Ohio and the investigator found no cause for further concern.
Rachelle Grimmer made her way to the to the town of Laredo in Webb County, Texas on the north bank of the Rio Grande River along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Laredo is one of the poorest places in the United States with a per capita income of just $13,600 hundred a year, or $261.54 a week before any payroll taxes are withheld. Rachelle Grimmer and her children was existing on about $6,000 a year from child support and whatever she earned making and selling decorative pillows. Federal Poverty Guidelines for a family of three currently stands at $18, 530 a year, or $356.35 a week.
In the short time she lived in Laredo, Rachelle Grimmer moved to three different residences before ending up in a tattered RV docked in a $400.00 a month slot in the Towne North Mobile Home and Trailer Park with no indoor water or stove. A refrigerator stood outside the trailer. Neighbors saw the children bathing under a garden hose outside and noted the boy wore the same pair of ragged shorts day in and day out. The children were registered with the Ingleside School District located on the Corpus Christi Bay as being home schooled even though such registration is not required in Texas, only suggested as a courtesy. Her neighbors at the Park described her as, “intelligent and compassionate.”
In July, 2011 Rachelle Grimmer applied for emergency assistance but was denied because the $400.00 a month she paid in rent and utilities was less than the $500.00 a month she received in child support. She filled out the 18 page application for food stamps but didn’t provide the required supporting documents and didn’t keep an appointment scheduled for the next day. Grimmer did not call to reschedule and the case was eventually closed
Things grew more desperate for Rachelle Grimmer. She sold her truck for $400.00 in order to buy food for her family and when that money ran out she resorted to wandering the highway in the wee hours of the morning as restaurants closed, begging to be given any scraps they were intending to throw away.
On November 16, 2011, Rachelle Grimmer called the child welfare agency and asked the decision in her case be reviewed. A Supervisor looked over the case file and determined everything had been handled properly. The Supervisor tried to call Ms. Grimmer the Thursday before the shootings with the results but Ms. Grimmer never answered her phone and her voicemail was full.
On December 5, 2011, Rachelle Grimmer entered the Food Stamp Office in Laredo with her children shortly before 5:00 and asked to be assigned a new caseworker. Grimmer was escorted into a private office where she pulled out a .38 caliber handgun and took about two dozen people hostage before being persuaded to release all the people not related to her by a supervisor in the office.
Over the next 7 hours, in a post-modern twist still strangely reminiscent of Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, 12-year-old Ramie managed to access Facebook and posted throughout the standoff.
Among this mix of mental illness and desperation we should pause to remember that this took place in Rick Perry’s Texas. In George W. Bush’s Texas.
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released data that shows the United States, which once prided itself on being the Richest Nation in the World, now has one in sex Citizens living in poverty. It is even worse if those Citizens are minors. In the year between 2009 and 2010 alone over 1 million children fell into poverty. Currently, with more than one in five children in the United States live in poverty and every other one of those living in extreme poverty. Although it was a bit before my time, I remember hearing tales of Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy walking among the poorest of the poor and vowing to wage a War on Poverty, a War which apparently kicked our collective asses and sent us running in full-bore retreat with our tails between our legs.
Today there seems to be a segment of society running candidates who vow to wage a War on the Poor instead of poverty itself. Texas’s food stamp program suffered through a disastrous privatization effort between the State and Accenture, LLC, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland and born of Arthur Anderson, which in turn was brought down by its actions in the Enron outrage. Texas was ranked as having the “worst performing food stamp program in the nation,” by the Federal Government, in part because of their “time-consuming and complicated assets test that impedes the effort to help desperate and hungry people.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, Stephanie Goodman, stated that the program had gotten much better over the past three years as 3.7 million Texans are now enrolled in the program and cited Grimmer’s ability to schedule an appointment the day after she applied, the appointment Grimmer missed.
Texas is also ranked next to last in the nation in per capita spending on mental health services. In 2003, Texas passed a law stating that the 39 government agencies that provided mental health services could no longer provide direct services and instead became managers of a network of private providers except as “provider of last resort.” This has resulted in a shortage of accessible mental health providers resulting in Texas’s prisons and jails becoming the de facto “providers of last resort.” Texas further cut its budget for mental health services in their 2011-2013 budget, passed in May, 2011. The original proposed cuts were $134 million but Legislators on both sides of the aisle came together to strip Governor Perry’s office of $23 million and apply it toward mental health, leaving the Governor with a paltry $900,000 a year with which to pay his staff, his rent and his travel expenses which amounted to almost $300,000 in security alone for out-of-state trips taken by the Governor and his family, including vacation trips his wife, Anita, took alone to such places as Madrid, Amsterdam and New York. It is expected that part of the budget will be reversed and the millions to Perry’s office restored as it “goes through the process” toward its September enactment.
In the same budget that further slashed money mental health services, one in which taxes were not increased though lots of various fees were; Texas also reduced funding for child abuse prevention services by 44%.. The budget also kept funding for family services at 2009 levels despite an increase of 8% in reported cases of abuse and neglect since 2008. These cuts come on top of years of cuts already made to these services, along with cuts to schools and medical care and anything else of value to a truly civilized society.
In Texas, in the United States, in the Year of Our Lord, 2011, a week before we celebrate the Miracle of His birth, 24% of all children, four percentage points above the national average. More than 600,000 Texas children have at least one parent who is unemployed this Christmas and looking for work and when they do find work it may not be enough to pull them out of poverty as Texas has the highest percentage of low-wage jobs of any States in the United States. This is Rick Perry’s Texas. George W. Bush’s Texas.
Texas brags on its Workforce Commission website about its strict limits on cash assistance to impoverished families and its policy of “Full Family Sanctions” against every member of a family, even the youngest, most vulnerable ones, when the adult member of the family won’t, or can’t, comply with Texas’s work requirements. There are some Current Conservatives who would argue that Rachelle Grimmer and her children were not “really” poor as she had a cell phone and her daughter had access to Facebook and those awful, awful posts where a little girl knew she “May Die 2Day,” and had become so inured through the things she had experienced in her twelve short years on Earth to write, “I’m bored.” At 10:52 p.m. she wrote “ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhahhhhhhhh” as if unleashing a silent scream across cyberspace. At 11:28 she posted, “tear gas seriasly” (sic). Seventeen minutes later she lie mortally wondered alongside her brother; her mother already past the mortal plain.
If Rachelle Grimmer had been approved for food stamps the average grant for a Texas family is $294 a month, or less than ten dollars a day on which to feed a family of three.
This is Rick Perry’s Texas. George W. Bush’s Texas. Texas is a vision turned reality that their Party, the Republican Party, would like to extend to all of America and the question remains to be answered if we all scream into a vacuum, will it ever be heard? Or will life as we know it in The Land of Plenty continue to go from Grim to Grimmer to Grimmest even beyond our wildest fears and nightmares?
Grimmer Trailer
Rachelle Grimmer
Ramie and Timothy Grimmer
Ramie Grimmer
Timothy Grimmer
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
Partisan politics gets in the way of helping poor and suffering people like this family, and I'm afraid this is just the latest story in a long line that will continue to appear in front of us.
Such a beautiful woman. Such beautiful children. What a waste. It kills me to think of those two kids dying thinking, "Is that all there is?"
a needless tragedy
Come this election, I think it would bear noting just how each and every legislator has performed at his/her very local base--just what kind of cutting they've done. The way this Congress has/hasn't done, I think we should vote out all the bastards, and write in "Mickey Mouse" if necessary [what happens if neither candidate(s) don't have enough votes--who "wins," then?]).
Then we need to be kinder to each other. I've gotten in the habit of schlepping my own groceries if I possibly can (and usually do)--then the bagger has 1 less trip to make. I take the time to separate my recycling--be kind to the planet (I've actually made a cottage business of this). I found a woman's purse w/wallet inside--cash gone, of course--but w/her driver's license, SS card and other documents--I mailed it back to her. Kindness really does beget itself.
Some months ago The Nation ran a piece called "Cruel America," about how we've devolved into citizens who will let others starve, go w/out, let someone else die for lack of insurance. We can start by doing it ourselves. Maybe CEOs, banksters and other greedy bastards can sponge off the rest of us and think they got away w/something--but they won't do it off me if I can help it.
rated
That. ^ Period.
We can't stand on this cusp much longer. We step up, or we fall.
Together. When the 99% shoulders the 1% are standing on are finally gone, what will they stand on then? Short-sighted they are.
Rated for tragedy.