A little girl’s Facebook posts serve as the last dispatches from a stomach-turning tragedy that took place earlier this week in a Laredo, Texas welfare office.
Monday night, 38-year old Rachelle Grimmer pulled a gun on a supervisor at the Texas Department of Health and Human Services branch office in Laredo. This would lead to a tense seven-hour standoff that would leave two dead and one in critical condition.
Grimmer, who entered the HHS office that day with her two children Ramie (12) and Timothy (10), was reportedly frustrated for being denied food stamps. According to reports, Grimmer had various applications for assistance rejected across various states. A spokeswoman for the Texas HHS Department said that Grimmer hadn’t been rejected, simply denied because she failed to provide all the necessary documentation in a specific time frame.
The motivations are not all that important in the end, as the result left Grimmer dead and both of her children critically wounded. Around midnight Monday, Grimmer fired three shots. Police rushed in and found her dead at the scene.
Her 12-year-old daughter’s use of Facebook during the ordeal serves as a chilling account, from the perspective of a child.
At 7:50 pm, Ramie strangely added “may die 2day” as her work.
At 10:34, well into the standoff, she posted this:
Then, just a few minutes later:
Her last post came just a half hour or so before the shooting started. The person who commented is listed as the children’s grandmother:
After struggling for a couple of days, Ramie Grimmer died from her injuries Wednesday night around 8 pm. The boy, Timothy, is still in critical condition at the University hospital in San Antonio.
This definitely isn’t the first use of Facebook during a police standoff to make the news. Back in June, a Utah man holed up in a hotel room with a girl identified as a hostage. The man took pictures with the girl and posted status updates during the standoff – giving the world a truly odd play-by-play of all the police actions. That also ended poorly as the man shot himself in the chest when police eventually stormed the room.
