Crimes (Filicide) Against Individuals Often Have Roots in Systemic Public Policy and Legal Failures

  The part of a statement from March 16, 2012 regarding the murder of George Hodgins by his mom, who later killed herself, is problematic because it erases the economic intersection between how the individual impacts of publicly-funded LTSS, delivered in HCBS settings, can prevent (or cause if the funding is inadequate) tragedies and crimes one person with a disability at a time:


https://www.thearcofil.org/arc-and-the-murder-of-george-hodgins/


Why is the story being told this way? Because we live in a world that doesn’t acknowledge the value of our lives as disabled people. Because so many people in our society can’t imagine a disabled person living a fulfilling life, so they don’t see the tragedy and the wasted potential when one of our lives is cut short.
As disabled people, we have to take a stand against this kind of thinking. We have to get the word out that our lives matter, [that our] lives are our own stories and not just the stories of our non-disabled parents and relatives and caretakers. We have to let people know that they are missing part of the story.
Because the story of George Hodgins’s murder is also the story of the disabled community losing one of our own. It’s the story of the other disabled people who were murdered by their family members, and it’s the story of the society that thinks so little of people with disabilities that these murders are all too often justified as “understandable.” Most of all, it’s George’s story – the story of a young man who enjoyed hiking, who was always looking to learn new skills, who had his whole life in front of him.
Now George is gone, and only his memory remains, and already that memory is being distorted by people who want to tell his story and leave him out. That’s not going to happen tonight. We’re here to remember the real story.


  More often than disability rights self-advocates are willing to publicly and directly admit people with disabilities need LTSS, as well as public funding for the LTSS, to help people with disabilities 'write' and act to make our lives our own stories not the stories of our non-disabled (temporarily able-bodied) parents and caregivers. 
 
  George "enjoyed hiking, …was always looking to learn new skills, who had his whole life in front of him," but could not learn new skills without help.  George was not getting the help the killer mom felt he needed from the services his killer mom turned down at the Morgan Center. 
 
  The killer mom didn't think Morgan Center adult services that George transitioned (aged) into were community-based or future-focused on helping George care for himself when his parents cannot or would help find another caregiver to replace aging parents who can no longer fill their caregiver role.

 The excerpt from this article 

http://www.mercurynews.com/2012/03/07/sunnyvale-police-mother-killed-22-year-old-autistic-son-then-herself/

shows the dependent living situation for George Hodgins and how the failure of systemic funding for transition services, with the goal of creating an independent living situation, for youth with disabilities 'aging out' stretched a caregiver mom beyond her limits with tragic and criminal consequences for individuals.  


“She said she was tired and was having a difficult time getting him into a program. She couldn’t find one that would take him,” neighbor Jacquie Jauch said Wednesday. “She was just tired, tired and very lonely. She said she just couldn’t do it anymore — take care of him.”
….
Jauch described the son — the couple’s only child — as low functioning and high maintenance, unable to speak and easily agitated, but fully mobile. The neighbors’ dogs frightened him. He often wore headphones and listened to music to calm himself down.
The neighbors weren’t sure why George Hodgins left the Morgan Autism Center. But Jennifer Sullivan, executive director of the center, said Elizabeth Hodgins told her that she wanted to find a program that was more community-oriented, where her son could be out in the world. He had been attending the school since he was 6, Sullivan said. When he turned 22, however, he could have moved into the adult program there.
When told that Hodgins was having trouble finding a new program, Sullivan became upset: “I wish we would have known. He could have come back here. We loved George.”
His mother adored him and the two were “very close,” she said.
“He was delightful,” Sullivan said. “He was nonverbal but very physically active. He loved walking and hiking.” He used a voice-output device that allowed him to communicate on a limited basis. He did not drive and “constantly was working on his independent-living skills,” she said. “He needed to be supervised at all times for his own safety.”
Having a child with autism can be very “isolating. You’re on 24 hours a day. There is no respite,” she said. “It’s ongoing, and once your children become adults, you continually wonder, ‘Who will take care of my child when I die?’

  It is as wrong to generalize the possibility of one person's success, such as articulate speech by AAC methods or finding meaningfully paid jobs without state and federally-funded Vocational Rehabilitation supported and customized employment services,  as it is to generalize the possibility of one person having problems based on the experience of others having similar problems.
  
  What the root of the rejection, by many leaders in the autistic self-advocacy community, of 'high functioning autistic' and 'low functioning autistic' labels or terminology, is really about is the lack of attention paid to how one individual manifests a set of problems and how to assist the autistic with paying the costs, in money and time, of customizing a solution to those problems to make the life of the autistic more meaningful on the terms of the autistic. 

  When a person with a disability with a developmental age, not matching chronological age, still needs constant supervision the need is a measure of the original meaning of the terminology 'low functioning autistic' where an autistic cannot perform ADA-defined Major Life Activities to enough of an extent a caregiver was needed to prevent unintentional self-harm.
 
“He [George Hodgins at 22] needed to be supervised at all times for his own safety.”

 Identifying a common set of problems and strengths, each manifested differently from autistic person to autistic person, to then start the process of helping each individual overcome the problems and maximize the strengths is what the concept of 'cure,' with respect to autism spectrum disorders, should be about.