Priscilla Daniels, wife of Arthur Daniels, killed in the rampage at the Navy Yard on Monday, is comforted by Deputy Director of Constituent Services for Ward 7, Lynnell Humphrey, who came to assist the family with arrangements on Tuesday. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post) 
 
 Above the sofa in Priscilla Daniels’s living room in Southeast Washington there’s a 
 
 flower-festooned shrine to her 14-year-old son. He was shot and killed four years ago on a D.C. street. 
 
 Now, after the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, Daniels, 46, has to hang another portrait, build another shrine. 
 
 This time for her husband. Arthur Daniels, 51, a handyman working for a contractor, happened to be moving and installing furniture in Building 197 on Monday morning. He was shot in an eerily similar way to his teenage son: in the back while running from a gunman. 
 
 That morning, Priscilla Daniels kissed her husband of 30 years and teased that they should stay in bed because it was raining. 
 
 “Stay home with me,” she told him. “But he said, ‘Bills to pay, I gotta go in.’ ” 
 
 They were high school sweethearts. She even named all of their four sons after him. They are known around the neighborhood for their different middle initials. There’s Arthur C. and Arthur L. Arthur A. was the teenager who was killed while walking home from the Metro with friends in February 2009. That same night, police said, the assailant robbed a man and stole a man’s car. 
 
 The fourth son, Arthur V., got into trouble with the law. He is serving 271 / 2 years for carjacking an 84-year-old woman while pointing a loaded pistol and demanding the keys to her car, according to D.C. Superior Court records. 
 
 “My husband was the man I loved through all the tragedy,” Daniels said, surrounded by family at her home. She wept, grabbing the hand of her daughter-in-law, then hugging her tightly. Then they both cried for what felt like a long time. The only thing for the rest to do was to stare at the floor. 
 
 Priscilla Daniels said she slept for only an hour or so Monday night, trying to make sense of the senseless. On Tuesday, she flipped through a pile of photos of Arthur and herself. They loved to go out on the town, shoes shined, hair done and holding each other as though they had just met. 
 
 “I can’t believe this is happening again,” Daniels said over and over as she rocked back and forth. 
 
 Arthur Daniels was the one who cooked Thanksgiving dinner every year for the entire family, including their five children and nine grandchildren. He spent weekends washing and polishing his white Crown Victoria, which was still at the Navy Yard. 
 
 The steady stream of visitors came, as they do when someone dies. They wanted to help, as they always do when they don’t know if they really can. They offered to cook meals, sit with her, answer the telephone. 
 
 “You go to the door to offer something, anything,” said Lynnell Humphrey, deputy director of constituent services for D.C. Council member Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 7). “But there’s no comfort. Nothing to say at all.” 
 
 Humphrey helped the family bury their teenage son. Now he is helping them arrange a funeral for the father. 
 
 “This family has been through a lot,” he said. “And gun violence has run, like fire, through it all.” 
 
 Arthur Daniels was the family’s breadwinner, and when Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) called Tuesday to offer condolences, he asked if there was life insurance. 
 
 “No,” Priscilla Daniels told him, weeping into the phone. She hadn’t thought yet about the bills that her husband — through extra handyman jobs on top of his day job — always managed to pay. 
 
 “Well, we are going to send someone out from my office to talk through all of that,” he said. “I am so very sorry.” 
 
 Then the Danielses’ only daughter, Iadora, 25, who works at Giant supermarket in Congress Heights, took her mother’s hand. She told her how on Sunday, while she was on a break, her father surprised her with a visit. It was the last time she would see him. 
 
 “We hugged and did our little jitterbug, James Brown dance — that’s our thing that we always do,” she told her mother. “Then he handed me $20 and said, ‘So you have some extra for something nice to eat, baby girl.’ ” 
 
 The parallels between the deaths of her husband and son are not lost on Priscilla Daniels. 
 
 Aaron Alexis, the shooter in Monday’s rampage, had repeated run-ins with his military superiors and the law and was cited at least eight times for misconduct for various offenses, according to documents and Navy officials. 
 
 The person who shot her son in 2009 — Ransom Perry Jr. of Northeast — had been arrested nine times before, including as recently as January of that year, on a charge of carrying a pistol without a license. He was sentenced to 24 years in prison. 
 
 Friends say the family was just starting to come to terms with the loss of their youngest child. 
 
 “Now we have to go through this all over again,” Daniels said. “When I fall asleep for a few minutes and then wake up, it all comes back to me. And I just can’t breathe.” 
 
 Julie Tate contributed to this report. ||||| Professor Stephen Hawking, who once said he thought assisted dying was "a great mistake", has changed his stance to support the right of terminally ill people who are suffering to end their lives. 
 
 Hawking, 71, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease – a form of motor neurone disease – at the age of 21 and was told he had only two or three years to live. 
 
 He said in 2006 that, although people should have the right to end their life if they wanted to, "I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope." 
 
 But in an interview with the BBC, Hawking, a cosmologist and theoretical physicist, offered his unqualified support to those who feel their life is no longer tolerable. 
 
 "I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their lives and those that help them should be free from prosecution," he said. "We don't let animals suffer, so why humans?" 
 
 He is concerned, however, that there must be safeguards to ensure that nobody's life is terminated against their wish. In 1985, when he became very ill with pneumonia, he was at one stage placed on a life support machine. His first wife, Jane Hawking, was given the option to turn it off. 
 
 "There must be safeguards that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressurised into it or have it done without their knowledge or consent as would have been the case with me," he told the interviewer. 
 
 Hawking has been held up as the supreme example of a human being who has triumphed over a failing body to achieve scientific and literary success. Only 5% of those diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease survive for more than a decade. Hawking cannot move and communicates through a computer slowly and laboriously, but produced the scientific bestseller A Brief History of Time, which sold 10m copies. Opponents of assisted dying have cited him as an example of why the law should not be changed. 
 
 His words are likely to further fuel the debate after tragic public appeals by several people who are terminally ill to be allowed to end their lives, including Tony Nicklinson, who lost his high court case for a change in the law to allow him help to die at home. Nicklinson then refused food and died within the week. 
 
 The Dignity in Dying chief executive, Sarah Wootton, said the British Social Attitudes survey in 2007 found that a large majority of both disabled and non-disabled people support a change in the law. 
 
 "Professor Stephen Hawking's comments reinforce that, providing proper and rigorous safeguards are in place in an assisted dying law, there is no reason to oppose a law which gives dying people the right to choose the manner and timing of their death," she said. 
 
 "Lord Falconer's assisted dying bill, due to be debated in the House of Lords next year, includes robust legal safeguards which would better protect people than the current situation where the law turns a blind eye to those helping loved ones to die. Such a change would not result in more people dying, but in fewer people suffering."
– Stephen Hawking has come out in favor of physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, provided there are significant safeguards in place. When asked about his position on the issue in 2006, the famous cosmologist and author called it a "great mistake," noting, "While there's life, there's hope," reports the Guardian. But in a new BBC interview tied to the upcoming release of the documentary Hawking, he changes his tune. "We don't let animals suffer, so why humans?" he asks, saying that family members should be free to help end a loved one's suffering without fear of prosecution. But precautions must be in place to ensure "that the person concerned genuinely wants to end their life and they are not being pressured into it or have it done without their knowledge or consent as would have been the case with me"—Hawking was put on life support in 1985, and his wife was given the option to pull the plug. In the documentary, which Reuters notes is set for UK release on Friday, he also addresses his failed marriages.