The last time Yolondo Lupoe saw her brother, he seemed to be enjoying life with his wife and five children. He fired up a barbecue and put an inflatable bouncy house and pinata in the backyard to celebrate his twin boys' second birthday. Six months later ...

Before the unspeakable horror that struck the tan stucco house on McFarland Avenue, the blue-collar folks who labor and live in the community called Wilmington had suffered their fair share — not unlike other Americans. Homes in foreclosure. Refinery workers mulling a strike. Cutbacks at the nearby Port of Los Angeles, where some longshoremen haven't found employment in months. A ...

Awash in debt, behind on his mortgage and recently fired from his job at a hospital, Ervin Lupoe was planning on leaving California. The 40-year-old father of five pulled his children out of school, packed his SUV with snow chains and winter clothing for him and ...

A man fatally shot his wife, five young children and himself, claiming in a note he faxed to a TV station Tuesday that the couple had just been fired from their hospital jobs and together planned the killings as an escape for the whole family. "Why leave our children in someone else's hands," Ervin Lupoe wrote in his letter ...