Laura Gonzalez was happy to be back at work after three weeks away that included a stay at a battered women's shelter. She saw it as the beginning of a new life. One without her husband and the father of her four children, she told co-workers. She wasn't going back to him this time, she said, and left for home. Less than an hour later, her 24-year-old husband, Jose Avila, launched a brutal final assault. First he shot his wife three times. Then, he began shooting the children. Avila's final act was to kill himself. Two of the children died at a hospital Thursday, a day after their two siblings were killed in the shooting that rattled the small southeast Texas town of Bay City. Their mother is hospitalized in critical condition.
Children deserve fit, loving, sane, stable, non-abusive, non-homicidal parents. There are unfit gay parents out there—as we've recently seen in Seattle, as we may be the case in Connecticut—just as there are unfit opposite-sex parents.
