Every day, driving to pick up my kids from school, I pass the house on Monterey Boulevard where, in October, a woman shot her two daughters and her husband in their beds, then went to the garage and took her own life. I can barely stand to look at it.
This week, the house in Westwood Highlands is back in the news because it sold for $2.2 million — $700,000 over asking — six months after the deaths of Paula Truong, Thomas Ocheltree, and their daughters Mackenzie, 9, and Alexandra, 12. People are shocked: Why would anyone want to live there? How could anyone pay that kind of money for a home where something so unspeakable happened?
I am not shocked. As a working mother of two who lives nearby, I see every part of this saga — the family’s financial collapse, the horror of what happened, the bidding war that followed — as a window into the precariousness of life in San Francisco. This story is not just one tragedy. It’s three.
The first tragedy and the desperation underlying it
We can’t know exactly what led Truong to do what she did. There is nothing that can explain the unexplainable. (opens in new tab) But we can contextualize it. As The Standard reported last fall, the mother snapped after years of mounting financial stress, failed businesses, and, most acutely, the loss of this very home in foreclosure…