Murder for Child Care

We've endured four suicide/family-murder news reports in southern California in the last three months, but this one tugs at my heart differently.

In this case the parents of five kids falsified their income to qualify for low-cost child care; that fraud cost them their jobs, both with the same employer, near the nonprofit child development agency to which they'd applied.

Three days ago the father used a gun to kill his wife, almost eight-year-old daughter, twin daughters five years old, and twin sons two years old.

"...we have no job and five children under 8 years with no place to go," said the suicide note of Ervin Antonio Lupoe in Wilmington, a working-class neighborhood in the shadow of oil refineries near Long Beach.

My sister-in-law with one set of twins coped by hiring a nanny for six years in Malibu. How do you cope with two sets of twins and an older child? Would Ana Lupoe have liked to stay home and care for her kids herself? Sounds as if that wasn't an option.

Ervin and Ana each earned $40 per hour as radiological technicians at a hospital; on their application they had claimed to be earning less than $10 per hour. Before being fired, they were already one month behind on their mortgage and unable to pay $17,000 in property taxes and penalties, according to the LA Times reports.

This tragedy takes me back to the days when I was earning $20,000 a year teaching part-time, and my earnings never quite equalled the cost of child-care for three kids.

If I hired 40 hours per week of care for the baby in my home, I paid $10/hr or $1700 per month--but the three-year-old needed the stimulation of preschool, another $2000 per month. Then when both were in preschool, I still needed someone to meet my older daughter when school got out at 2:35 pm. With three kids, I couldn't seem to get child care under $4000 per month, while my take home was something like $1500 per month, maybe $3000 if I worked two part-time jobs.

In my case, my husband's salary took care of our mortgage and living expenses. I felt bad that my income could barely equal the child care.

Why was I even working? I was inching toward a full-time college teaching position, which eventually came. Staying home with my children was an option but not what I wanted.

The financial stretching around two sets of twins and another daughter, not to mention the emotional strain, is all too real to me. My child-care costs were twenty years ago, but I expect today a child in a low-cost center would still be maybe $2-3,000 per month. Times two is $5,000, for twelve months is $60,000--or more.

And that's just the two-year-olds. Someone still had to care for the older kids after school, especially the two with just a half-day in kindergarten.

Of course $60,000 plus another amount was a strain, even for a family with an income before taxes of $166,000.

I don't mean to excuse the father's insane solution.

I'm just asking everyone to consider the human cost of not providing affordable, subsidized child care in this county, the way European countries do.

With unemployment rising, holes in the supposed national safety net become increasingly tragic.

~ ~ ~
See "Couple in Wilmington murder-suicide fired for alleged fraud," Los Angeles Times, Jan. 29:
http://www.latimes.com/la-me-children-killed29-2009jan29,0,3963081.story

Other recent killings:
October 5, Porter Ranch: Karthik Rajaram killed his wife, mother-in-law and three sons, and himself, panicking over the stock market plunge.
December 24, Covina: Bruce Pardo killed his wife, himself, and 8 others in a bitter divorce case.
May, 2008: Magrit Ucar killed her husband and herself; he and three other family members, including twin daughters who had just graduated from college, had taken drug overdoses in a mysterious family-enmeshment case with five deaths (All the details of this tragedy appeared in an LA Times analysis on Jan. 23.)