A woman, who recently moved from Ohio to Texas, died by her own hand during a standoff at a Texas state welfare office, where she had gone to obtain food stamps. She shot her two children before taking her own life. The children are hospitalized in critical condition.
This could happen anywhere. Rising social service needs in my own community are in direct and losing conflict with declining resources. One thing that is happening here is that private agencies are increasing their service loads and creating new programs, an endeavor that churches and other faith communities are joining.
We have decent homeless shelters. All of them are not just shelters who offer a few programs, they are Programs that happen to have a shelter(s) attached to them. We also have a couple of daytime programs that provide social contact, meals and life skills help, as some of the shelters here do not allow residents to hang around during certain hours. They are supposed to be out, looking for jobs, taking working and training at various state agencies, and some of them find their way to me, where I help them with all things employment related, including access to social services, all things I may share at some other time.
Programs, shelters and social services (both public and privately funded) are there to help with not only the homelessness, but the issues and life circumstances that lead someone to being homeless. Mental illness is right up there, at the top. Dangerous behaviors, self-medication with alcohol or other drugs, including prescription medications,
Some sheltering programs are more strict than others, something which I personally support, having lived in one of them last year, and they range from that model of responsibility all the way down to one being way to touchy-feely to be of significant help except for the most motivated.
Those who are not especially motivated, they drift from shelter to shelter, city to city, state to state and back again, their disruptive behavior, thieving ways and the continuance of the substance abuse wearing out their welcomes, initiating their next trip, next stop, until it all begins again. They pretend to have whatever issue that the shelter is designed to help. The nicest thing they are called is shelter hoppers.
I share all of this because it is my experience and every moment of this work shapes and informs what I do and how I want to do it.
I have no idea if the woman was employed, had a place to live, if her children were in school, if she were fleeing domestic abuse or substance use, mental health care issues, none of the things that might have contributed to her desperation this week. All anyone knows is that she was desperate enough to have a gun, cause a standoff with the authorities and eventually injure her children and take her life.
Whilst it will be helping and interesting and useful to learn more about her, not a thing can be done to help her and her family now. All for which we can hold hope is that we can learn from what happened and use that to try to prevent it from happening to some other family in some other city.
And, whatever we learn, I am positive that what happened was not just about being denied food stamps. It was about something that began/happened, or did not begin or happen, much earlier. It is about a breakdown, a failure in the System. It is about of things to which we had better begin acknowledging and for which we take serious action. It is about resources being inappropriately wasted and not being available for those truly in need, even if turns out that the woman in this situation was not failed by anyone or any agency. In fact, I guarantee it.
CBS News
Mom denied food stamps shoots kids, kills self
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57337766/mom-denied-food-stamps-shoots-kids-kills-self/
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