CATSKILL - The violence that erupted outside the Poughkeepsie, New York train station on Friday afternoon lasted only a few short minutes, but the series of events that led up to it, relatives say, had been festering for many years.
When 27-year old Lee Welsh arrived in Poughkeepsie, his estranged wife Jessica, 28, was expecting to pick up her car from him. Authorities say Welsh shot his wife dead, then shot and killed a responding city police officer, 18 year veteran John Falcone, 44, and finally turned the gun on himself.
The violence that erupted outside that train station lasted only a few short minutes but the series of events that led up to it, according to relatives, had been festering for years. The deadly violence that wound up being exported to Dutchess County had its roots in Greene County, inside a tiny house on the outskirts of Catskill, where Lee and Jessica Welsh were raising their four children.
"This has been ten years," Lisa Nieves, Jessica's mother said as she showed up to pick things up at her daughter's empty home. "Lee had sort of calmed down for a while and she decided he was straightening out and they were going to get married and once they got married it (domestic violence) started up again."
Lisa says her daughter had been choked and beaten in recent months but even after being arrested and jailed, Lee violated an order of protection only to strike again.
"Sometimes you get sick and tired of being sick and tired," Jessica Williams, Lee's mother says of her son's pent up anger. "Lee is a person who can take so much. He just has a very bad temper. He didn't like nobody telling him what to do or how to do it. He just wanted to be the boss."
"Everybody wants to be "gansta", she continued. "Nobody's going to tell me what to do either."
Williams acknowledges her son has a violent past. She says her husband used to beat her and Lee often witnessed the attacks. She believes Lee had struck her daughter-in-law on many occasions.
When asked if she ever told her son point blank, "Don't hit your wife," She responded, "No," but says she advised him to "Stop the nonsense, go to counseling, and think about your children."
Lisa Nieves calls it an issue of control. "I told my daughter, "I don't even think he loves you." It's just that he needs to control you and when he can't do that he'll do anything to make it so he can control you."
Jessica Williams says she suspected something would happen after her son dropped off furniture, food, and photographs to her earlier in the week, as if he knew he wouldn't be needing them. She says she put it all together too late.
Nieves says, "For guys like this, it's just a vicious cycle. It happens over and over again and this is what happens."
She says she wishes judges who are letting guys out of jail who have committed acts of domestic violence would wake up and keep them in jail if they continue to violate orders of protection.
Nieves tells NewsChannel 13 she doesn't think her daughter knew Lee had a gun otherwise she never would have gone to Poughkeepsie.
Jessica Williams says Lee told her he was planning to convince his wife to come away with him some place down South to start their lives all over again.
Now the only plans in the works are funeral plans.
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