A Bridge Too Far

Police are continuing to investigate the circumstances leading up to Busby's desperate actions. Her family and neighbors said it was clear that she was under incredible stress, but they never thought she would do something so drastic. Busby had been previously arrested for assault, burglary, criminal trespassing and assaulting a public servant. (She was convicted in each case—save the assault involving a public servant, which is pending.) In 2001, she was arrested and later sentenced to a year in jail after she found another woman in her boyfriend's house and attacked her with a knife.

She could be affectionate and attentive to her children, inquiring about the names of their friends' parents. But local child-welfare officials gave her parenting classes after they found the children dirty and unkempt. The children were also placed in foster care for a few months after authorities arrested and convicted her during a domestic-violence incident with a previous boyfriend.

Busby's new neighbors say they saw her as a caring but overwhelmed parent. Christopher Bickham, 27, said "she really seemed like a nice person. She was a single mama, going through single mama problems. I knew her life was stressed. She was looking for a job, looking for a babysitter. From what I could tell, she wasn't a bad parent, but she must have hit the breaking point and thought, well, we'll all go to heaven. It is horrible. I can't justify what she did, but I can understand the mind frame. She also tried to commit suicide, so maybe in her mind she would have been doing the best thing for her kids."

His girlfriend, Marquita Henderson, a 20-year-old mother of three young children, took a sharper view. "I understand the pressures. But she didn't have to do that. To hurt her own, that's crazy," Henderson said. "The fire station is less than a block over. They would have put her kids somewhere safe if she thought she was going to hurt herself. Really, she ruined her life and her kids. She scarred them deeply. They didn't deserve that. I'm going to pray for them all."

None of Busby's relatives could be reached for comment Wednesday night; nor could the man she sometimes lived with. A female cousin told The Dallas Morning News that Busby complained that she had trouble keeping a boyfriend because of the kids and that she once said, "I can't take this. I just feel like killing all of us." Busby's sister, Monica Busby, was sobbing in the arms of a friend Wednesday morning when she told a local television news reporter "she wouldn't let nobody help her with the kids, she'd rather throw them off the damn bridge than let somebody help her, that's what I don't understand."

"Sometimes these incidents, they're unexplainable," Sergeant Cerda said.

© 2008