Money Woes Cited in Grandma’s Arrest

The district attorney’s office is considering charging 71-year-old Mary Ruth Blanco with attempted armed robbery. Her family is considering the way mounting financial trouble can drive good people to do bad things.

After a lifetime of taking care of others--53 years as a wife, 41 years as a mother and 35 years as a foster parent to hundreds of needy children--Blanco was on the cusp of losing everything because of something she never cared much about: money.

Last week, she and her 75-year-old husband, Raymond, of West Covina received notice that the IRS was going to garnish half his pension check--$750--for the next eight months. A few days later, their mortgage company threatened to foreclose over $900 in unpaid property taxes.

Increasingly ill with diabetes, the grandmother who helped care for her daughter, son-in-law and 2 1/2-week-old granddaughter was becoming desperate. Saturday night, authorities say, she snapped.

Blanco took a relative’s World War II-era .32-caliber Colt automatic handgun, drove her red pickup to a nearby self-serve station and demanded a clerk empty the register. Safe behind bulletproof glass, the young clerk ignored her and called the police.

As Blanco drove off, frustrated, the clerk noted her license plate number, which police used to track Blanco to her home. She was arrested Saturday night without incident on suspicion of attempted armed robbery and is being held in lieu of $50,000 bail in the jail ward of Los Angeles Medical Center, authorities said.

“I want people to understand that Mary is a very good, sweet person and she is not a criminal,” Raymond Blanco said, trying to hold back tears. “I don’t think she even knew what she was doing.”

Lt. Dan Leonard of the West Covina Police Department said that when officers moved to make an arrest and asked the residents of Blanco’s home to leave, Blanco came out with her hands up by her eyes. The gun, recovered later, was not loaded, Leonard said.

“She was embarrassed and seemed very upset and remorseful,” Leonard said. “Life is not supposed to be this way.”

Blanco and her husband moved to East Los Angeles from Texas in 1948. He worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 26 years, after a 4 1/2-year Navy stint during World War II. Blanco was a homemaker whose daughter attended Garcia High School, along with scores of other children and teenagers the couple took in and tried to help along the way.

In 1988, they fulfilled their longtime dream of getting a bigger home for their oft-changing family, buying a home in Saugus. With five foster children at the time, they reasoned, they could use the extra room. But when the rains came in 1992, their dreams washed away with the runoff. Although they were still licensed foster parents, Raymond Blanco said, the county refused to send them any more children because of the dangers of the washed-out roads. Eventually, the bank foreclosed on their house. They moved to West Covina when a relative stepped in and offered to let them live in his home after he moved away if they took over one of his two mortgages.

Lately, however, things had deteriorated again, Raymond Blanco said. The couple had consulted a tax preparer about their troubles with the IRS and were awaiting word when they got the letter about the garnish.

They learned only last week that the property taxes needed to be paid by Monday, or they would again face foreclosure.