Is Los Angeles snakebit? It feels that way today, with the city falling apart in epic proportions, harder hit by home foreclosures and unemployment that almost any other area of the West, and now leading the official Bad News segments of national and global news organizations.

It seemed to come to a head yesterday with the insane, sick Ervin Lupoe massacre-suicide.

News reporters couldn't decide whether to spin this mass murder as a horrifically tragic tale of economic woe or a blood-drenched story about a gun nut who snapped and decided to take everybody in the house down with him.

Then early today, a wrong-way driver, probably drunk or on drugs, got

on the Santa Monica freeway and slammed head-on into the car of a

Culver City cop, killing the officer. Traffic was backed up for many miles on the city's Westside, and

cops all over Los Angeles were in mourning. 

All this human carnage cast a pall over L.A. on this incongruously beautiful, sunny January day.

At the coffee shops, folks were openly wondering what is wrong with

Los Angeles. That question seemed especially pointed when some media

reported that, among Ervin Lupoe's last communications was his truly

gross claim that his wife was in on the killings of their two sets

of twins and fifth child.

This well-liked mother was in on this infanticide and child-killing? Is that really possible?

We'll see. We

already know that Ervin Lupoe spewed other big lies before he killed

his family in their big house down near the Port of Los Angeles. He alerted

authorities that he was planning a murder-suicide, for instance, but

police now say that was a dodge– Lupoe had already murdered them all.

We know that this couple was devastated by their firings from

Kaiser, after officials there allegedly caught them committing financial

fraud for personal gain, involving a child care program.

But the Lupoe family massacre is not looking like an economics story or

a recession story. A company would fire a worker over that kind of wrongdoing, if they believed it to be true,  recession or

not.

Given Ervin Lupoe's lying, even on his soon-to-be deathbed, it won't

be surprising if police announce that, no, this was not a case of matronly

infanticide. That this was a bloody scheme that played out entirely inside the head of Ervin Lupoe.

Would such a revelation make Los Angeles feel any better about its ugly, violent self? No, but the media might get a grip on some of its “recession caused murders” overhype.

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