Quadruple Murder Rocks Barre and Berlin

In early August, Vermont was rocked by a heinous spree of shootings, culminating in a triple homicide in a townhouse in Berlin. The shootings have sparked intense debate on both gun control and the future of foster care programs in Vermont.

Jody Herring, the alleged perpetrator, was angry after losing custody of her 9 year old daughter. Eyewitnesses say Herring drove to the Department for Children and Families (DCF), where she waited in the parking lot for Lara Sobel, a 48-year-old social worker involved in the custody battle. When Sobel left work for the weekend, Herring opened fire twice with a .270 caliber hunting rifle, killing her.

Ken Schatz, the commissioner for DCF, described Sobel as “an experienced social worker” who had been “providing public service for children and families for more than 14 years.”

The subsequent morning, law enforcement responded to a call in the nieghboring town of Berlin. At the farmhouse, officers discovered the bodies of Julie Ann Falzarano and Rhonda and Regina Herring - the aunt and two cousins of Jody Herring.

Earlier in the day, Jody had warned her family to stay out of the custody battle. “You guys need to stop calling DCF, unless you guys are going to have it coming to you,” she told them via the phone. The family had reportedly called DCF on multiple occasions to express concern over the child’s well-being. Tiffany Herring, the daughter of the deceased Julie Ann Falzarano and the first person to discover the bodies, described the traumatic scene to the Burlington Free Press. “Both doors were wide open,” she explained, “and I walked into the living room, and that’s where I saw my mom dead.”

Herring has received international attention in the media for her flippant behavior following her arrest. According to prosecutors, Herring was laughing and joking with law enforcement just hours after the shooting in Barre.

Jody Herring pleaded not guilty in Vermont Superior Court in Barre to charges of aggravated murder.

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin condemned the attack in a press release and reflected on the rarity of such mass killings in his lifetime.

“I think all Vermonters are as shocked, dismayed, horrified and grief- stricken as all of us are,” Shumlin said. “I cannot remember, in my lifetime, four people being murdered by the same alleged perpetrator.”

Shumlin is not forgetful – as a percentage of the population, Vermont has the lowest rate of gun murder of any state in the nation. In 2010, The U.S. Census Bureau reported that there were .3 gun murders per 100,000 Vermont inhabitants. Compared to other states, Vermont has a middling rate of gun ownership, estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau at about 42 percent in 2010.

Still, the killings occurred in the midst of a polemic national debate on firearm regulation. Nationally, the lethality and frequency of mass shootings has escalated since the turn of the century. However, popular frustration with lawmakers has not produced momentum for either side, with support for stricter gun laws actually dropping significantly in the past two decades to approximately 50 percent.

It remains to be seen whether a nuanced debate on gun control will occur in 2016 and if Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton will use it as a wedge issue against her populist rival Bernie Sanders. In late June, Pro-Martin O’Malley Super PAC Generation Forward launched a caustic attack ad against fellow contender and former representative of Vermont Bernie Sanders. The ad cites his opposition to the Brady bill, and claims that “Bernie Sanders is no progressive when it comes to guns.”

Before the shootings in Berlin and Barre, Sanders defended his position on gun control. “What guns are about in Vermont,” the senator told NPR in an interview, “is not what guns are about in Los Angeles or New York where they used not for hunting, or for target practice, but to kill people.”

Instead, Sanders emphasized the role of mental health in such massacres.

We have a crisis in the capability of addressing mental health illness in this country,” he said. “When people are hurting and are prepared to do something terrible, we need to do something immediately. We don’t have that and we should have that.”

hen it comes to the health of the children involved in custody battles, DCF walks a fine line. If social workers are too aggressive, they risk taking children away from their parents prematurely, but if they are too lenient, they risk leaving children in unsafe households. Jody Herring had lost custody of her previous two children, and was reportedly frustrated with the agency. “My mom, having lost two other kids, was very adamant on keeping her [the nine year-old daughter],” said Desiree Herring, the adult daughter of Jody Herring.

In May of 2014, DCF came under withering criticism for its inability to protect children under its care. The Campus reported on the deaths of two children, two year-old Dezirae Sheldon and a fifteen month year-old boy, who both died while they were meant to be in DCF custody. In response, a special legislative committee was tasked with investigating the child welfare system.

A report by Vermont State Police Detective Lt. James Cruise said that there was a systemic failure of information sharing and accountability” in the case of Dezirae Sheldon.

Now, the death of Sobel has sparked a different form of criticism. Critics of the child welfare system have focused on the grievances of social workers.

The DCF is a busy agency – it received over 17,000 calls in 2013 alone. Yet these workers are woefully undersupported. The agency’s inability to de-escalate Jody Herring’s custody battle may be linked with staffing issues. At a forum last summer, many social workers expressed frustration at the current system and its lack of institutional support.

“I’m triaging my cases,” said Tracey Brown, a social worker in Burlington, in reference to her enormous workload and her inability to deal with all of the cases simultaneously.

Some social workers have said that they feel pressure from judges to reunify families, and from supervisors to close cases. Such pressure undoubtedly contributes to a lack of caution when dealing with such delicate situations, though it is unclear whether it played a role in the custody battle with Jody Herring.