Tx: 4 Dead in Murder-Suicide
Peter Dostal
2:14 PM February 12, 2001
HOUSTON -- The little girl was the only one of four children to survive.
Timothy Rumsey and three of his children were found dead in a closet by
SWAT team members entering the home. The 2-year-old was found in the
same closet but survived.
Paramedics who took the little girl to the hospital, say she was
conscious and alert. The doctor who is currently working on her arm is
the same surgeon who successfully reattached a little boy's arm after
the child was attacked by a tiger last year. The surgery is expected to
last about six hours.
The other three children, 7, 9, and 11, were all found dead of gunshot
wounds, as was the father.
Police say the shootings occurred at the end of a 12 hour ordeal where
Rumsey held his family hostage. It was apparently prompted by a domestic
dispute.
It began at 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, the mother, Joy Rumsey was able to get
out of her house and walk down to the police headquarters. She told
police that Timothy Lee Rumsey was holding their four children hostage,
ages 11, 9, 7, and 2.
Mrs. Rumsey told police her husband was a violent man who has mood
swings because of drugs. She also says that her husband has several guns
inside the residence.
SWAT teams got to the house at around 1:00 Monday morning. They were
trying to re-establish contact with Mr. Rumsey. They did speak with him
once, but Mr. Rumsy hung-up after saying the lives of his children were
in jeopardy.
Lynn Smith
What happened to the little girl's arm? -Lynn
Peter Dostal
Lynn Smith wrote:
> Peter,
> What happened to the little girl's arm? -Lynn
Below article says a little bit more.
site has picture of Timothy Rumsey:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/822629
Feb. 14, 2001, 2:03AM
Truth was a stranger to killer
Katy father called skilled con man
By TERRY KLIEWER Houston Chronicle
KATY -- When Timothy Rumsey warned police that he'd had all he could stand,
it may have been the first time in quite a while that he had told the
unvarnished truth.
The last thing he told Houston SWAT officers Monday morning from inside the
house where he was holed up with his four children was that everyone inside
would die unless lawmen backed off.
Again, he was telling the truth.
That one of the children -- his 2-year-old daughter, Haylee -- would somehow
survive the ensuing mayhem was something he probably didn't foresee.
But it appears these two spasms of honesty were the only recent occasions
when Rumsey really leveled with anyone.
Police and prosecutors in Michigan, where he had multiple run-ins with the
law, remember Rumsey as a manipulative, conniving man for whom truth seemed
to be a stranger.
He usually had plausible explanations for flying out of control, they recall.
He usually convinced people that he was sorry and wouldn't repeat the
mistake.
That's pretty much what he told the Special Weapons And Tactics team outside
his house on Katy's north side Monday. He said he had been through the same
drill in Michigan and added grimly that he wouldn't do it again.
Ironically, Rumsey, 42, and his 33-year-old wife, Joy, were re-enacting a
familiar script Sunday night when they suddenly came to the attention of Katy
police.
Joy Rumsey had walked the half-mile from the family's modest rented home to
the police station to complain about her husband's daylong tirade and threats
against her and the children -- Haylee; Kirstie, 7; Dylan, 9; and Brittany
Whalen, 11, Joy's daughter by another marriage.
Joy Rumsey asked police to get her children from the house so they could be
away from her husband overnight "to let things cool down," said Katy Police
Chief Robert Frazier.
Officials in Michigan say Joy Rumsey had been to police there, too, during
the couple's troubled marriage, seeking protection from her husband's
violence, both threatened and real.
Police had repeatedly stepped in for her safety, sometimes sending Timothy
Rumsey packing, only to find out the two had reconciled and were together
again. In 1998 the couple divorced, only to remarry a few months later.
A 1999 beating he gave her led to his guilty plea to domestic assault. He
received probation but violated it by yet again threatening his wife.
Timothy Rumsey fled Michigan, however, and ended up in Katy last May. By
August, his wife and children had rejoined him here, unwittingly setting the
stage for one last cycle of violence.
Experts say the push-pull dynamics of such relationships defy easy
understanding, but they are characterized by a cycle of accusation and abuse,
followed by apology and reconciliation.
Frazier said the pattern is so common that his officers figured Sunday night
that a simple phone call and retrieval of the Rumsey children from their
house at 5814 Delfren Lane would have been all the situation called for.
But when Timothy Rumsey told police to stay out of it or face what Frazier
termed "grave consequences," the situation grew ominous.
"He sounded like he'd been drinking -- a lot of profanity," Frazier said
Tuesday. "He cussed about his wife and all the trouble she'd gotten him in."
As police mulled what to do, a calm-sounding Brittany Whalen called the
station and told her mom not to come home because "we're all tired." Her dad
probably told her to call, said Frazier.
Meanwhile, Joy Rumsey confirmed that her husband had a pump shotgun, a
semiautomatic pistol and a crossbow in the house.
Sensing the growing urgency, Katy police called on the Houston SWAT team. By
then Joy Rumsey was a bystander, Frazier said.
"She wasn't hysterical so much as just beaten, whipped -- totally passive,"
he said.
Police surrounded the house, and in his last phone contact with them, about
4:30 a.m., Timothy Rumsey warned that he would kill everyone in the house,
himself included, if officers tried to come in.
Ottawa County, Mich., probation officer Lee Soncrant, who supervised Rumsey
after his 1999 conviction for beating his wife, described him as "something
of a con man, actually. He'd tell you whatever you wanted to hear."
Soncrant's job was to get behind the smoke screen to determine the truth of
Rumsey's probationary behavior, but that was complicated by Rumsey's apparent
willingness to follow all the rules -- up to a point.
"He was a likable sort of guy, and I never had a problem with him," recalled
Soncrant.
Timothy Rumsey was mostly unemployed, though he claimed to work sometimes as
a carpenter. His wife was launching a day-care service in the home and had
recruited a handful of customers.
"How they were paying their rent, I don't know," said Frazier, "but they were
paying it. They had a home. The kids were in school."
But their comparative invisibility vanished Sunday when the couple's daylong
argument precipitated a nightlong standoff and, ultimately, four deaths.
Frazier said Rumsey shot each of the three older children once in the head
and once in the body with a 9 mm Beretta pistol. He may have used only one
bullet in wounding Haylee, but it did massive damage to her left arm.
She was in critical but stable condition Tuesday after surgery.
Rumsey shot himself in the head. SWAT team members broke into the home about
9:30 a.m. Monday and found the heap of bodies in a closet.
Maggie
***This has got to be one of the most monumentally stupid women on the planet.
Too bad her children had to suffer for her idiocy.
Maggie
"When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things
were as bad as we'd been saying they were."--John F. Kennedy
