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.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29 The week continues with an amazing, infuriating news report, co-written by ProPublica’s Justin Elliott and Jesse Eisinger and NPR’s Laura Sullivan and detailing the embarrassing failures of the humanitarian organization the Red Cross. “In 2012, two massive storms pounded the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hungry or without power for days and weeks,” begins the report, published at ProPublica.org. “Americans did what they so often do after disasters. They sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Red Cross, confident their money would ease the suffering left behind by Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac. They believed the charity was up to the job. They were wrong.” The report then supplies a parade of galling examples, including but not limited to: Red Cross supervisors ordering dozens of aid trucks to drive around empty “just to be seen”, emergency vehicles being taken off relief work to serve as backdrops for press conferences, and gross mishandling of donations: “In one case, the Red Cross had to throw out tens of thousands of meals because it couldn’t find the people who needed them,” reads the report. Kicky closing quote: “Two weeks after Sandy hit, Red Cross Chief Executive Gail McGovern declared that the group’s relief efforts had been ‘near flawless.’” Stay tuned for rolling heads.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30 In lighter news, the week continued with the semi-regular story of a human’s love of animals overriding his or her aversion to feces. The most recent newsworthy example comes out of Providence, Rhode Island, where this morning animal control officers visited an apartment, about which they’d received a complaint about a tenant hoarding cats. The complaint was accurate, with a total of 69 cats removed from the tenant’s apartment and handed over to the Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Providence Animal Rescue League. “The tenant was not immediately charged,” reports the Associated Press. “The apartment was described as ‘dirty’ in the police report.”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31 In better news, the week continued with the official dissolution of Mars Hill Church. “Following much prayer and lengthy discussion with Mars Hill’s leadership, the board of Mars Hill has concluded that rather than remaining a centralized multi-site church with video-led teaching distributed to multiple locations, the best future for each of our existing local churches is for them to become autonomous self-governed entities,” wrote Pastor Dave Bruskas today on the Mars Hill website. Whatever the de-centralized churches do, they can’t call themselves Mars Hill. “They must become their own churches, create their own 501(c)(3), governance, leadership, etc.,” as Mars Hill spokesman Justin Dean told the Bellingham Herald. “We will provide seed money if we have it, but they are free to start independent and cannot use the Mars Hill name.” To celebrate, some more words from today’s Mars Hill web bulletin: “Mars Hill Church has never been about a building or even an organization,” writes Pastor Bruskas about a church that took ridiculous risks to elevate its brand and had a “Global Fund” to plant Mars Hill churches around the US and the world. “Mars Hill is a people on mission with Jesus, and that singular focus continues as these newly independent churches are launched. It’s still all about Jesus!” But like many things hyped as “all about Jesus!,” the main Mars Hill mission remains money: “Give generously, as your gifts in November and December of this year will make a critically important difference in our desire for 13 churches being healthy and sustainable from launch-day and thereafter,” advised Pastor Bruskas in his post. “Ultimately, the success of this plan, and the future viability of each of these new local churches rest solely on all of us continuing to be faithful in supporting Jesus’ mission through our attendance and continued giving.”

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1 Nothing happened today, unless you count the cancellation of the second half of Seattle's FreakNight, a Halloween rave that was supposed to span two days at WaMu Theater, but which was called off today after a 20-something man suffered a fatal overdose of the synthetic drug molly after attending the event last night.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2 In better news, the week ends with a hilarious cock-up for the derogatorily named Washington Redskins, as today a bus full of Redskins players crashed into another bus full of Redskins players en route to a game. (No one died, just some whiplash and back spasms, so laugh away!)

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