LOS ANGELES _ The two women tried to avert disaster.
Kandince Cuellar told her abusive boyfriend she was going to leave him. He was having terrible headaches and said he wanted to die. She was afraid.
Her best friend, Marlene Lopez, tried to persuade him to go to the emergency room for help; she thought it would keep all of them safe. Maybe tomorrow, he told her.
They hid his handguns, the 9 mm and the chrome-plated revolver. But they missed the Remington Wingmaster 12-gauge shotgun tucked away in the garage.
That's the one Eric Krause grabbed on a chilly November day. The one he used on Cuellar and her lover, Geoff Garland. The one he finally turned on himself.
Chances are, you didn't hear about the double murder-suicide in Atwater Village, which played out in the early morning darkness on Veterans Day. It happened just days after a gunman shot 12 people to death in a Thousand Oaks country music bar, while raging wildfires scorched the state and midterm elections flipped the U.S. House of Representatives from red to blue.
But news overload is not the only reason the carnage in the small stucco house with a Spanish tile roof escaped widespread notice. It claimed three people who were bound by poverty, addiction and mental illness. Like many in Southern California's growing population of people who are homeless, and those who are nearly so, they were searching for a place to belong. They found one _ and that was the problem.
This is a crime story. And a love story. It's a story about life on the porous border between haves and have-nots, between hanging on and losing everything, between home and homeless encampment, between life and death.
Most of all, it's a story about Los Angeles.
