Editorial: Could any person possibly have been more in need?

Sometime soon, as early as Monday with any luck, Rita Spicer will flick the switch in her Palatine Bridge home and, for the first time since May 2, the lights will go on.

They’ve been off, as The Gazette has reported in three stories since then, not because the 47-year-old woman — whose body is riddled with cancer and whose husband has cirrhosis — didn’t pay her power bill or rent. It was because the man living in the house behind hers decided her utility pole was rotting to the point of being unsafe. At least that’s what he says. And after sending a letter to the North-Carolina-based landlord and not getting any satisfaction, he took it upon himself to pull out the supply wire, effectively shutting off Spicer’s service.

Since then, she has had no lights, no refrigeration and no hot water; she’s had to cook meals for her family (including her 9-year-old daughter) on a tiny charcoal grill in her yard — all the while trying to cope with the effects of cancer that has spread from her lungs and lymph system to her brain and liver.

To keep Child Protective Services at bay, she took her daughter to a relative’s home in Fulton County for baths, and after four weeks she was finally able to borrow an electric generator which, because of the price of gasoline, she has only been able to afford to run for an hour per day.

Her nightmare may soon be over, only because the man responsible for disconnecting her service, Andrew Dingman Sr., who was charged with felony criminal mischief and misdemeanor tampering, doesn’t want to wind up in jail for his misdeed. So he bought a new pole, dug a hole for it and is planning to get it installed and ready for reconnection as early as Monday.

It seems nothing less than astonishing that for all of the public officials and people in social services and relief organizations who were made aware of Spicer’s plight over the past month — and according to Gazette Reporter Ed Munger they’ve included the county social services department, FulMont Community Action Agency, Red Cross, state Crime Victims Board and Assemblyman George Amedore’s office — no one was willing to go to bat for her. DSS did get her some food stamps and offered to pay her first month’s rent if she moved (given her physical and financial condition, this would have been difficult, if not impossible. And, aside from the problem with her neighbor, she was happy in her home, where she had lived for only the past few months.)

Everyone else — with the exception of prosecuting District Attorney James “Jed” Conboy, who has pressured Dingman to get Spicer’s service restored — has passed the buck. Shame on them.