Woman, 71, Arrested in Attempted Robbery

The district attorney’s office is considering charging 71-year-old Mary Ruth Blanco with attempted armed robbery. Her family in West Covina is considering the way mounting financial trouble can drive good people to do bad things.

After a lifetime of taking care of others--53 years as a wife, 41 years as a mother and 35 years as a foster parent to scores of needy children, police said--Blanco was on the verge of losing everything because of something she never cared much about: money.

Last week, she and her 75-year-old husband, Raymond, received notice that the IRS was going to garnish half of his pension check--$750--for eight months. A few days later, their mortgage company threatened to foreclose over $900 in unpaid property taxes.

Increasingly ill with diabetes, the grandmother who helped care for her daughter, son-in-law and 2 1/2-week-old granddaughter was becoming desperate. Saturday night, authorities say, she snapped.

Blanco took a relative’s vintage 32-caliber Colt automatic handgun, drove her red pickup to a nearby Unocal self-serve station on Pacific Avenue and demanded that a clerk empty the register, police said. Safe behind bulletproof glass, the young clerk ignored her demand and called police.

As Blanco drove off, frustrated, the clerk noted her license plate number, which police used to track Blanco to her home. She was arrested Saturday night without incident on suspicion of attempted armed robbery and was being held in lieu of $50,000 bail in the jail ward of County-USC Medical Center, authorities said.

“I want people to understand that Mary is a very good, sweet person and she is not a criminal,” Raymond Blanco said at his ranch-style home Monday, trying to hold back tears. “I don’t think she even knew what she was doing.”

Lt. Dan Leonard of the West Covina Police Department said that when officers moved to make an arrest and asked the residents of Blanco’s home to exit, Blanco came out with her hands up by her eyes. The gun, recovered later, was not loaded, Leonard said.

“She was embarrassed and seemed very upset and remorseful,” Leonard said.

Blanco and her husband moved to East Los Angeles from Texas in 1948. He worked for the post office for 26 years after a 4 1/2-year Navy stint during World War II. Blanco was a homemaker whose daughter attended high school nearby, along with the dozens of other children and teenagers the couple took in and tried to help along the way.

In 1988, the Blancos fulfilled their longtime dream of getting a bigger home for their oft-changing family and bought a house in Saugus. With five foster children at the time, the couple reasoned, they could use the extra room.

But when the rains came in 1992, their dreams washed away with the runoff. Although they were still licensed foster parents, Raymond Blanco said, the county refused to send them any more children because of the dangers of the washed-out roads. Eventually, the bank foreclosed on their house.

They moved to West Covina when a relative stepped in and offered to let them live in his home after he moved away if they took over one of his two mortgages.

Lately, however, things had deteriorated again, Raymond Blanco said. In addition to her diabetes, Blanco fell a few months ago, breaking several ribs; breathing was hard for her, her husband said.

The couple had consulted a tax preparer about their IRS troubles and were awaiting word when they got the garnishment letter.

They learned only last week that the property taxes had to be paid by Monday.

Although the pressure was mounting, Raymond Blanco said, his wife seemed to take the stress with her usual hopeful spirit.

“We had no inkling of what she might do,” he said.

Friday night, Raymond Blanco said, his wife went to bed with him as usual. Police said the attempted robbery took place just before 5 a.m. When he encountered his wife in the hallway in the morning, Raymond Blanco said, he had no idea she had been out.

“The stress of these bills, the letters, the payments, the sicknesses--they all combined to make her go over the top,” Raymond Blanco said. “My wife is not the type of person to do this thing.

“It’s just something that overtook her.”