The 55-year-old man who pulled out his handgun and killed a young child and the child’s grandmother at a Palm Beach County Publix Thursday had been struggling for months to make ends meet.
Timothy Jamieson Wall was barely staying afloat financially as a temporary laborer on a construction crew in January, when he filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition, claiming he had $6,000 in assets and $215,000 in liabilities and was earning just $2,165 a month.
He certified having $27 in the bank, $743 in Bitcoin and one other asset that would become relevant six months later: a 45 caliber firearm he claimed was worth $300.
In April, his bankruptcy petition was granted, discharging almost all of his debt, including more than $4,000 in credit card charges he owed Bank of America.
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Born in New York in 1965, he married his Argentinian-born bride in Boynton Beach in 2003. Their marriage ended in divorce after 15 years. He and his ex-wife are parents of a 14-year-old daughter, according to court records.
In 2007, the couple created a cleaning service company that used as it address a mailbox inside a UPS store inside the Crossroad Shopping Center in Royal Palm Beach. The company dissolved in 2013.
The UPS store they continued to use as a mail drop is just around the corner, 100 yards away, from the Publix where Wall would kill the grandmother and her grandchild before turning the gun on himself.
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While Wall had been doing temporary labor at the beginning of this year, the owner of the company that assigned him work said he only lasted about three weeks, quitting after saying he “found something else.”
The company’s owner said he was unaware of any complaints about Wall from the client that used his labor, a company he declined to identify.
His divorce was recorded as uncontested by the county clerk of court, but seven months after it was granted his ex-wife filed suit seeking his eviction from the home they had shared in West Palm Beach. A judge agreed that he should move out, as they had agreed in their divorce settlement, and he apparently did so by mid-2019.
