The Grinch Who Stole Everything But Christmas

John and Susan Maloney and their two young children were killed last Saturday night in a crash on Highway 37. He was a sales and marketing vice president at a solar services company. She had just quit her job and was going back to school to become a Pilates instructor. Their son was eight years old and their daughter five. They were coming home from the airport, returning from a Hawaiian vacation. While we await toxicology reports to make it official, most signs point to the driver of the other car, which ran a red light before colliding with the Maloney's car broadside, was drunk at the time of the accident that made them all die. Steven Culbertson was only nineteen years old, and had already had his license suspended two years ago for drunken driving.

And you might think this story is horrible enough and Mister Culbertson is the demon in this piece. As it turns out, there are lower forms of life walking around on two legs. Michael Gutierrez and his girlfriend Amber Marie True burglarized the Maloney's home in the days after the fatal crash. They took the Nissan 350Z. They took jewelry. They took a Blu-Ray player. Some credit cards. Who would miss that stuff, right? They're dead and all.

When they couple appeared in court, they insisted that they didn't know that the Maloneys were the ones who died in the crash. "Someone" had told them that the house was going to be empty, they said. "I had no idea what had happened to the family. I am not a monster," said Gutierrez from his cell. "I don't want people to think I'm a cold-hearted man. If my little girls had to go through that, I would be devastated." He was referring to the his daughters, a two-year-old and four-month-old twins, fathered on between his stints in prison. Their father, who was arrested in October in San Mateo County for methamphetamine possession, being a felon in possession of a gun and possession of stolen property, is not a monster. Their father, who left the mother of his children for a woman who was a criminal just like him, is not a cold-hearted man.

Yeah. Right.