NYT-1201: STATE OF THE ART A Thermostat That's Clever, Not ...

nd Human Services building, at times sitting in a
chair with her daughter on her lap and communicati
ng with the police on an office phone.
About 10 minutes before midnight, about seven hour
s into the standoff, she hung up on hostage negoti
ators. Moments later, three shots were heard. Ms.
Grimmer had shot both of her children in the head,
and then herself. She died at the scene. The chil
dren were taken to University Hospital in San Anto
nio. Her daughter, Ramie Marie Grimmer, 12, died o
n Wednesday. Her son, Timothy Donald Grimmer, 10,
died a day later.
Carlos R. Maldonado, Laredo’s police chief, said t
hat the denial of benefits was only one of a serie
s of issues that had been troubling Ms. Grimmer, b
ut that investigators had more questions than answ
ers about her motive. The police were not certain
if she was being treated for mental health problem
s and did not know why she moved several months ag
o to Laredo, a border city of 236,000, where she h
ad no family.
“Unfortunately in these situations, there’s a lot
of questions that we have and a lot of those quest
ions may never be answered,” Chief Maldonado said.
“I think we did everything that we possibly could
to resolve the situation. We heard people say, wh
y didn’t the tactical team intervene and do someth
ing about the mother and save the children? There
was never any inclination, any information availab
le to us, that the children were in any danger at
all.”
But Ramie appeared to have known her life was in d
anger. At one point during the standoff, using an
office computer, she updated her Facebook page, wr
iting “may die 2day” in the section for posting wh
ere she worked. Later, she wrote, “tear gas serias
ly,” though none was used by the police.