Sorry, Steve: That is not your house

Make no mistake, Steve Groene suffered.

When Joseph Duncan III slaughtered Groene’s ex-wife and two of his children in 2005, certainly a part of him must also have died. Surviving daughter Shasta, then 8, endured unspeakable acts before her rescue later that summer.

Duncan is on death row while serving 11 consecutive life sentences without chance of parole. Shasta, now 21, has been incarcerated and received treatment for substance abuse while working toward building a new life. She has two young children with a third on the way. To complete the tragic trifecta, Steve Groene was ravaged by cancer around the time Duncan was destroying lives. He talks through an electronic speaker device.

While compassion for Steve Groene is warranted, a local judge was correct in ordering Steve’s eviction from a $240,000 house purchased by the tremendous efforts of organizers and the generosity of many community members — a house purchased for Shasta’s benefit, not her father’s.

Creators of the Shasta Groene Trust were very clear about their objective in raising money.

From a Nov. 3, 2006, article in The Press, when only $1,850 had been raised: “This girl needs a place that she can call home so she’s not moving around and can have some stability in life.”

From that same article: “Everything we raise would go into the Shasta Trust, which would buy her the home for her benefit.”

Those words were spoken by a benefactor who now is the target of verbal attacks from an ungrateful Steve Groene, who has lived rent-free in Shasta’s house for more than a decade while Shasta has spent many of those years away from the house. The idea had been that because he was Shasta’s only surviving parent, Steve would raise her there. But that’s a whole other story.

In researching newspaper archives, there’s no indication that Steve was ever the magnet that attracted donor dollars. It’s the Shasta Groene Trust. Had organizers wished otherwise, it would have been the Steve Groene Trust or at least the Steve and Shasta Groene Trust.

But now it’s time to move — and to move on.

Steve Groene must make his own way in life while Trust administrators sell the house to raise cash for Shasta’s educational pursuits until she turns 25.

While Steve Groene has suffered, he is not the victim here. By fighting over what was never intended to be his, Steve is perpetuating the image of a father capitalizing on his daughter’s unimaginable terror and subsequent tribulations. Had he been allowed to continue squatting in Shasta’s house, Steve Groene would have been depriving his daughter of the only financial asset that can help her fashion a better life. We have to believe he’s a bigger man and better dad than that.