Last Days: The Week in Review

Talia Frenkel/American Red Cross
Is anything in there?

MONDAY, OCTOBER 27 This week of dissolved cults, charitable failures, and endless family horror kicked off with a relatively lighthearted story out of Houston, where a man was shot in the face after trying to grab a gun held by his baby. Details come from the Houston Press, which reports the scene went down this past Saturday, when 20-year-old Patrick Sanders was taking a nap on his living-room couch, with his trusty handgun stashed in his pocket. After the gun slid out of the sleeping man’s pants, “[t]he man awoke to find it in the hands of the three-month-old boy,” as police wrote in their report. “Sanders apparently tried to grab the gun from the infant, which caused the gun to fire. Sanders was shot in the face.” The gun-toting baby was uninjured, Sanders was hospitalized in critical condition, Houston police are investigating.

>>Meanwhile in Seattle, tonight brought a horrible scene to the Rainier View neighborhood, where a 78-year-old man fatally shot his daughter and preteen granddaughter before killing himself. “911 calltakers received a call at 8:17 p.m. from a 10-year-old boy—the killer’s grandson—reporting a shooting inside the house,” reports Seattlepi.com. “[Police] arrived to find the 39-year-old woman and her 11-year-old daughter dead, as well as the elderly gunman.” Some good news: The 10-year-old boy escaped unharmed and is being cared for by extended family. Still, if there’s anything sadder than a 78-year-old man en route to suicide taking a detour to kill his 11-year-old granddaughter, write it on a note card, affix it to a bottle of tequila, and mail it to Last Days, c/o The Stranger, 1535 11th Ave, Third Floor, Seattle, WA, 98122.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28 Speaking of family bloodshed, the week continued in New York, with the seasonal story of the Halloween prank that is not a prank but is instead a bloody crime scene. Today’s scene: the street in front of an apartment building on Long Island, where neighbors reported seeing what they first thought was a Halloween stunt: a decapitated body, lying a few feet away from its head. It was no stunt: “The woman has been tentatively identified as Patricia Ward, a 66-year-old assistant professor at Farmingdale State College on Long Island,” reports CNN. “She was decapitated shortly before 8 p.m. Tuesday by Derek Ward, 35, with a kitchen knife in the second-floor apartment they shared…Less than a half hour after his mother’s body was found, Derek Ward apparently jumped in front of a Long Island Rail Road train heading east from Penn Station in Manhattan and was killed, police said.” In a statement obtained by CNN, a Farmdale College spokesperson described Patricia Ward as “well-known, well-liked and well-respected. The campus is a very sad place today.” Worth repeating annually forever: If you’re planning a murder-suicide, do the suicide part first.

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