PHOENIX — A funeral is just the beginning to a long road of grief for a family learning to live without Clayton Townsend.
Officer Townsend beat testicular cancer just a few years before dying when a man who admitted to texting while driving, slammed into him during a routine traffic stop.
Townsend's family tells 12 News the officer tried to get a life insurance policy, but could not secure an affordable rate due to the cancer he beat.
"My heart is just absolutely breaking for the family," Pat Elliott said from her home in Mesa.
Elliott never met Townsend, but she understands the difficulties he faced as a survivor trying to better the lives of his family. She is now beating cancer for the second time. Diagnosed with breast cancer in her 30s and now battling leukemia years later, Elliott was denied both health and life insurance.
"Insurance is based on actuarial tables. Their whole business is based on risk and loss and guess. The tables tell them that somebody may get cancer again and die, that's a risk for them they don't want to take," Elliott says.
Elliott says she is surviving cancer, but it's just as hard to survive financially. It's a burden she says is now unfairly placed on a family already dealing with way too much.
Officer Townsend's father-in-law set up a GoFundMe page to help with this exact issue just after learning of his death. Anything helps.