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. 

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. 

The Ocheltree-Truongs’ struggles were intense but not unusual. They ran a series of small businesses. Their kids went to a nearby public school. They played golf at the scruffy public course in McLaren Park. They were trying to live what passes for a normal, middle-class life in San Francisco. The problem is that to live a middle-class life in San Francisco, you actually have to be rich. And they couldn’t keep up. The home — 1,793 square feet, three bedrooms, two baths (opens in new tab) — would be solidly middle-class in almost any other U.S. city. Here, it cost $1.35 million when they bought it in 2014, and they were about to lose it.

When the news broke of the killings, the group chat I’m in with other neighborhood moms exploded — not just with horror, but with something harder to name: a kind of nauseated recognition of the stress this person must have been under. We can’t understand her actions, but we can understand her desperation. The feeling like you’re drowning. The enormous fear of losing the thing that keeps your family safe: your home. Hell, when I was laid off in 2020 and had to pay the mortgage on our three-bedroom, two-bath 1,700-square-foot home — the exact size as the home on Monterey Boulevard — the panic almost swallowed me. 

My point being: To raise a family here without being a millionaire means living with a certain lump of desperation in your throat. When my kids want to sign up for another expensive after-school activity because their friends are all doing it, I feel it. When I fork over thousands for summer camps so I can keep working through the summer to pay our bills, I feel it. When I have to pay an unexpected $10,000 to fix water damage to our home, I feel it. We all do.

The second tragedy is that this kind of home — a three-bedroom, two-bath starter family home — is in such scarcity in this city. According to the SF Planning Department’s 2025 (opens in new tab) Housing Inventory report, only 17 single-family homes were built last year. That is why so many were willing to bid well over the asking price to buy this one. An open house in March was packed with prospective buyers, many of whom knew the property’s awful history. Though $2.2 million sounds to many like a shocking amount to pay for a home where such horror took place, it’s actually, in the current market, something close to a deal. 

A quick glance at recent comparable sales in the neighborhood suggests that the house would likely have sold for closer to $2.8 million if not for the so-called “stigmatized property discount.”

Sejal Kotak, 34, who toured the open house with her husband and infant son, told The Standard, “We care about getting a good deal. Maybe it is a reason to negotiate.” 

Kotak is not an outlier. Surveys (opens in new tab) show that roughly 30% (opens in new tab) of Americans say they wouldn’t hesitate to buy a home where a murder had occurred, and another large chunk say they’d consider it with the right price reduction. In New York, where apartment buildings turn over every few years, a history of death in the unit is seen as commonplace. In San Francisco’s single-family home market — where inventory is chronically scarce, where a three-bedroom is the holy grail for any family hoping to put down roots — the calculus is even more stark.

“It is truly incredible to see how the factors that really upset people in down markets almost don’t exist in up markets,” said San Francisco real estate appraiser Parker Jones. He explained that there’s not a set amount that you can deduct from a home’s value due to a violent crime because, thankfully, there just simply aren’t enough data points to draw a relevant conclusion. He’s seen homes where violent crimes occurred sell over asking in hot markets and well below asking in cooler ones.

The market right now is scaldingly hot — citywide, the median home price reached $1.7 million in March, up 19% from last year, according to Redfin (opens in new tab). And so living in the scene of a crime, and potentially even raising a family in a home where another family tragically died, is a trade-off people will naturally be willing to make. 

Every time I pass the home, I think there is something that could be done: a humane thing, a practical thing, a thing that would allow the neighborhood and the victims’ friends and family to begin to heal. You could knock it down. You could raze it and build something new. It has been done before (opens in new tab) with homes far more notorious than this one.

In the 1970s, my mother, an actress, was living in Los Angeles in a beautiful home she shared with her then-boyfriend, the actor John Savage. His Hollywood agent, Rudy Altobelli, owned the house and rented it to Savage, but both men neglected to mention one significant detail about the property. My mother found out the truth when people kept scaling the gate to snap photos of the front door. It was the house where Sharon Tate and her friends were murdered by the Manson Family.

That house — 10050 Cielo Drive (opens in new tab) — was demolished in 1994. A new mansion was built in its place, with a new address, designed to be unrecognizable. An act of architectural mercy.

In San Francisco, where it is extraordinarily difficult to build, where housing is prohibitively expensive to construct, and where the permitting and planning process can stretch for years, that suggestion is laughable. From a policy standpoint, the idea of voluntarily taking a livable home off the market is nearly unthinkable. Our city is so protective of old housing stock that in 2018 (opens in new tab), when a man demolished his house in Twin Peaks to build something new, the city forced him to build an exact replica of the old one instead.  

When people express shock that anyone would spend $2.2 million to live in a house where a family was killed, I want to offer a different kind of shock: that we live in a city where this is what a starter home costs, where the financial pressures on families are so immense that they can contribute to catastrophe, and where even the small mercy of tearing down a site of tragedy and starting over is beyond our reach.

And so the house on Monterey Boulevard will stand. Someone will move in. And the rest of us will keep driving past, averting our eyes.