Good morning to all of you, and thank God for another beautiful day for this is a sad story.
Several weeks, ago a relative of my wife (umm... her much older half-sister's daughter) saw her grandson the doper come home from jail. He was on foot, and his Grandma's house was the first stop after being released.
She said he was acting unusually industrious, cleaning up her messy patio. I told her that I thought he was out there looking for a lost drug stash when she described the ensuing disaster. See, the kid never cleaned anything in his life, and all of a sudden he's doing whatever I do when I have lost a wrench: start cleaning up the place.
I think he found something because she said that she saw him messing with a barbecue lighter, on the barbecue, even though there was no meat to barbecue.
She said she was standing at the kitchen sink when she saw him come in the back door and go out the front door in a hurry. She looked out after him and saw no one, so went back to the sink. A minute later she realized that the barbecue was on fire and so was her porch and all the junk on it.
She said she ran out of the apartment, looked around in horror for her missing grandson, and then realized that her pets were in a burning building and ran back inside.
She emerged with one scorched guinea pig and burns on 30% of her body. Her apartment and all her possessions burned to the ground, and she landed in a hospital bed with skin grafts and painful wounds.
I do not think the grandson has been seen since that day, which is extremely fortunate for him; but I expect that parole dept has sent the sheriff a warrant for his arrest.
After as much time in the hospital as MediCal with allow, she was sent home to live with an adult daughter. She was surviving but in much pain because some of the skin grafts failed and she had lost some muscle tissue as well.
We received the call yesterday that the coroner had confirmed her dead, at the age of 58 years, of unknown causes at the daughters house. I suspect that she had an infection that the hospital had failed to successfully treat and succumbed to sepsis.
There are other possibilities but I am not going to speculate on them, and I will just say that I'm quite horrified by the entire course of events.
I'm going to go try and clean up my garage and cheer up a little bit. My wife is not taking this very well at all.
