Woman denied welfare killed herself and shot her children

A WOMAN in Laredo, Texas, angry because she had been denied food stamps, killed herself and shot and critically wounded her two children.

The 38-year-old woman entered the Texas Health and Human Services Commission office in Laredo and demanded to speak to a supervisor, said police investigator Joe Baeza.

The woman pulled out a handgun and started walking through the office, threatening several employees, he said.

“She had issues and felt that she had been let down by social services in general,” Baeza said. “She was making all sorts of outlandish claims.”

She took an office supervisor hostage in a room in the office, he said, and a SWAT team managed to evacuate the other three dozen people in the office and clear the area.

After two hours of negotiations, the woman allowed the male supervisor to go free, but remained in the office with her two children, a 10-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl.

“About 11:45pm, she hung up the phone with negotiators, and a little bit later, negotiators heard three shots,” Baeza said. “What had happened was that she had shot each of her children once and herself once.”

The children were airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio in extremely critical condition, he said. The mother was dead at the scene, he said.

Baeza said the woman, from Ohio, arrived in Laredo about eight months ago and had lived with her children in several locations around the border city of 236,000.

Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Commission, confirmed the woman applied for food stamps in July and was denied. Goodman said the woman’s application was incomplete and that she was not sure whether the woman qualified for assistance.

“We’re still trying to track down exactly what happened with the case,” she said. “As you can probably imagine, I think she had a lot of other issues she was dealing with as well.”