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Foreclosure provokes suicide
Those of us old enough to have grown up talking with our parents about the recent past will remember having heard stories of ruined businessmen jumping out of windows on "Black Tuesday," October 29, 1929. The circumstances differ slightly, but history has begun to repeat itself.
Quoting from the Houston Chronicle:
Foreclosure Provokes Suicide
A 12-hour standoff ended this morning with a north Houston man lobbing Molotov cocktails at Houston Police before taking his own life rather than vacate a home he'd lost to foreclosure.
James Hahn, a chemist, had told police he would not be taken from the home alive, said Capt. Bruce Williams, an HPD spokesman.
" 'You know what I do for a living and you know what I am capable of,' " said Williams, recalling one of the conversations police had with the man on Wednesday.
The standoff began at 1:10 p.m. Wednesday when police said Hahn pulled a gun on Precinct 4 constable deputies who had attempted to serve him with a warrant for eviction at the home in the 21000 block of Covington Bridge in Spring, authorities said.
It would appear that Hahn had prepared for the standoff. He had nailed plywood over windows and doors and stuffed insulation into cracks. A cache of weapons and explosive devices were found in the home, along with a gas mask, chemical suit similar to those worn by Haz-Mat crew members.
Williams said it explained why Hahn didn't vacate the house after police shot tear gas into the residence on three separate occasions in the hopes of bringing the standoff to an end.
Williams said Hahn was recently divorced, depressed and struggled with financial problems and drug addiction.
"We believe this particular individual was not going to go peacefully," Williams said.
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"We're not leaving today. And this is only going to get worse for you come out now," a SWAT negotiator said.
An hour and a half later, Hahn shot himself as officers closed in on his home.
Residents noted there had been a number of foreclosures in the neighborhood lately.
But none imagined that Hahn would take his life rather than leave a home that no longer belonged to him.
Comment: The needless death of anyone is a tragedy. An untimely death precipitated by nothing more than a financial problem is doubly tragic.
Some of us who question the morality of having a government entity (the police) collect our debts or enforce contracts by the use of deadly force have a bit of experience you may not. Any time I've had to do a forcible eviction, the problem with the tenant seemed obvious from the start, in hindsight. So if anyone had gotten hurt, I might have felt ever-so-slightly responsible. Even though I believe that someone who makes a contract with me and deliberately refuses to perform is stealing from me and mine, just as surely as if he'd burglarized me or robbed me with a weapon.
In this case, of course, the police didn't fire a single shot, and the man would likely have ended up dead sooner or later because of his mental condition.
I wouldn't hazard a guess what exactly happened there, but I can tell you that police do not have a great deal of skill in handling a situation where someone is distraught. My cop friends (current and retired) agree that this is an area in which there seem to be no "right" answers. Having once stood literally nose-to-nose with a cop who was screaming at me to "calm down," I can assure you that the threat of force never helps in a situation where someone is already angry or depressed. "It's only going to get worse" was probably not the right thing for the SWAT negotiator to have said, however honest an assessment it may have been.
And yet, without the threat of force, no contract or law would be enforceable, at least among some people. We delude ourselves into believing that if the government (i.e., law enforcement people) are the ones to exert that force, it is somehow superior to our having personally done so, or having hired a bounty-hunter to work for us. The financial stalemate is broken, and our hands seem to have remained clean.
It's a situation where no moral choice exists.