I'm sitting here today thinking on memories of my dear grandmother who was killed at the hands of an immigrant she was helping. A God-fearing woman, she was always willing to open her home to anyone in need heeding the admonition of Jesus to feed the hungry, house the homeless and clothe the naked. She did all three.
Growing up, when me any my sister stayed with her for extended periods, it was not at all unusual for her to answer a knock late at night from a homeless person seeking a roof over his head and a hot meal. She was only too happy to oblige.
As a little boy, it was normal to have complete strangers sleeping in the bedroom next to me and on beds and army cots in the attic and basement. They were all treated like family and thank God none of them harmed us. But eventually, one of them came for her...
If you've read my blog, you'll remember me telling you how she loved to cook and would be hurt if a visitor failed to ask for seconds. In the post Life Is Precious #14 - Food Is Life, I shared some of the good things about her, while leaving out the parts I'm writing about today as they were too painful to write down at the time.
I would always tell friends to skip lunch when coming over, and that they damned well better save room for seconds. And if you REALLY wanted to make her day, you asked for THIRDS! Her blessed face would light up as she glowingly filled your plate with heaps of delicious food. Afterwards she'd say "Thirds! Would you believe it!" and beaming, she would talk about it all week.
It made her so happy.
Her real name was Marie, but her friends called her "Gallie" because while a strong woman, she could also be very playful and feminine.
There was a cross in every room but the bathroom, as she took her worship of Lord Jesus very seriously. She'd always tell us about the Bible verse in Hebrews 13:2 which says:
"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."
But the young man who attacked her was no Angel.
Beaten While Doing Good
It happened when I was in Job Corps. I'd been having dreams about grandmom, and in those dreams she'd look at me and say "help me." So I called her and checked in to see if she was alright, telling her about my dreams. She chuckled and said she was fine, and I begged her to stop letting strangers into her house as the city was changing in a bad way. But she wanted to help people and said it was the christian thing to do.
The city had changed. The safe and quiet Polish, Irish and German neighborhood she lived in and that I'd been partly raised in, was now being inundated with immigrants from other countries. Many were here illegally drawn to the rumored safety of the area which was one of the 25 safest towns in America as recently as 1980.
Not anymore.
Hopping over the southern border with ease, many arrived here with no background checks, and no way to ascertain who was violent and who was not. Thus a permanent crime wave started and began to spread, which slowly forced the good people to flee the city.
But not my grandmother.
She saw the good in people, and had an old-fashioned sense that if you treated people with respect, they'd do the same to you.
So the immigrant, hearing that he could get free food at her home. knocked on the door...
The first time, she fixed him a plate, and he ate it on the porch.
The second time, she turned to go get him a plate, and he sat down on a chair uninvited in the living room and ate.
The third time, he was at the door when she again said "let me go fix you a plate" when he pushed his way in and the attack began.
He hit her while her back was turned.
An elderly woman...
We know what happened because there was a young child asleep in a chair that was right up against the wall. She heard the violence of the attack and the screams of my poor grandmother. The girl was home alone and didn't know what to do at first.
The immigrant viciously beat my grandmother, knocking her down and kicking her in the face. Blow after blow landed on this senior citizen by a young man demanding money for his drug habit. Leaving her in a heap on the floor, the migrant took her cash and ran out the door, but the little girl was outside now and saw where he went...
In my dorm room at Job Corps, I couldn't sleep so worried about my grandmother I was, when the RA (Resident Assistant) interrupted a Dorm Court session that I was the Secretary of, to tell me that I had an urgent call.
When I heard that she was in critical condition I almost collapsed. "What happened?" that's when I learned she'd been attacked when feeding an immigrant.
Beaten while doing good...
I rushed home of course not knowing if she'd make it, but she did. This happened two weeks after I went back to Job Corp after my 2-week leave was over. I wanted to stay with her longer, but that's all the time they gave us, two weeks a year.
The migrant was a 22-year old guy from a country south of the border. The little girl next door and her family told us where he lived, his house was two blocks away...
Not about to wait for a slow and inefficient "justice" system, a group was formed and went down there. I'll just say "some work was done" and leave it at that. Afterwards, his people told us he had a drug addiction, and didn't mean to hurt my grandmother (yeah, kicking her in the face wouldn't hurt, right?). He ended up being deported back to his home country, and they were warned that he'd best not be seen in this area again.
Shortly afterwards, when he learned about what happened, the landlord of their building kicked his family out as well, and since they were also here illegally, they were deported too.
Someone went to stay with grandmom once she got out of the hospital, and I went to live with her early the following year when I graduated form Job Corps.
But she wasn't the same...
Not only was her frail body broken, but her spirit was as well. This once vivacious woman, now lived in constant fear. Gone were the marathon cooking sessions which she loved, and the harmless strangers sleeping over. Just two years later, she died due to complications from the beating...
She was a good woman.
Recently here on Hive some jackass who likes to comment-spam, came onto my page as I’d blogged about how immigrants had destroyed my city. I'm a cool, calm guy, but I did something I've never done before, I lost my temper when he told me "you can't blame immigrants for crime" and invited him to take some of these MS-13 gang members into his own house. He couldn't have known the price we paid in losing grandmom, but I was tired of excuses being made for criminals who attack God-fearing decent people like my grandmother.
If something like that happened to you, I'm sure you'd understand.
Prior to this, I actually held a pro-immigrant viewpoint, never dreaming that one would end up killing a woman who was almost our neighborhood’s version of Mother Teresa.
My feelings about immigrants didn't change immediately. After grandmom died, they opened the federal immigrant processing center nearby, and we were FLOODED with migrants. It was watching them for years openly push Americans out of jobs and bragging about it that changed my opinions over time.
Today the city like many other towns in the region is immigrant-majority. We now experience unheard-of levels of crime and violence. The decent people have about all been run out. The little Polish store that me and my grandmother shopped in when I was a boy, closed after the elderly owner and his wife were pistol-whipped by immigrants during a violent robbery.
I went down there to help them pack up and move out. They were like family to me, but they too lived in fear. Here were more good, decent, God-fearing people being run out of town.
The wonderful Italian guy who ran a pizza shop that his family had opened here in the 1920s, fled to Italy after two attempted robbery shootouts by guess who? The 80-something year old man that I knew who ran the cigar store was shot in the face and killed by a teen migrant when he refused to hand over his money. He was six months away from retiring, and I'd begged him to leave amid the rising levels of violence.
There have been so many murders here of people that I knew, good people that I grew up with. Many of the migrants hate the ones that are leaving thinking that the good people no longer want to live with them.
They're right.
They Don't Really Care About Us
Here, immigrants only care about other immigrants. That's whay it was so hard for me to find work last year when I had my financial difficulties. It's hard to get a job if you're not one of them, and if you do manage to get hired, they'll do all they can to run you out so another one of them can take the place of an American.
They even have a saying: "When an immigrant leaves a job, he must be replaced by another immigrant!"
We have to watch during their "celebrations" as they burn the US flag and shout about how they hate this country that now feeds them.
It's sad, because I love America.
This has hollowed out the city and caused a massive brain drain. The educated taxpayers who helped fill the city coffers are leaving. The migrants who now brag about being the majority (over 70% now), have less customers with discretionary income to spend at their small businesses. This has led to a violent turf war over drugs, as they fight (now) each other for a dwindling slice of the pie.
They're now the majority of a dead city.
This place is now like the wild west with shootouts all of the time, be glad you don't live here.
So when you hear me say that I often hear gunshots when I'm blogging at night, I'm not kidding. It's really bad. The human traffickers lie to the migrants and tell them of this area's reputation as it was 50 years ago. So when they arrive, they're surprised when they hear "pop, pop, pop," in the evening hours. No, that wasn't a car backfiring! Those were gunshots! Boy did you choose the wrong area to live in!
Grandmother Left A Legacy Of Love
What I'll remember most about grandmom is that she truly lived by the example set by Jesus when he walked the Earth 2000 years ago. No one in need was ever turned away. If you were hungry, you got fed, simple as that.
I can still remember that cold winter's night when I was 9. I bumped into a hobo who was staying with her as he was coming from the bathroom as I was going to one. He apologized and went back to his warm bed in the attic and back to sleep.
Grandmoms house was always filed with people who had nowhere else to turn to. She shared her bounty with everyone, and taught me to be independent and to always be "puting by" and staying stocked up on food, water and emergency supplies. A natural-born prepper, she didn’t trust banks and kept her money hidden all over the house and even buried in the backyard.
I'm convinced that if she were here with us now, she'd own crypto and be on Hive. She helped make me the man that I am today and I miss her dearly. If there's a Heaven, I know she's in it and I'll see her again someday. She was a good and decent woman, and I honor her memory with this post.
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