With No Job And 5 Kids, 'Better To End Our Lives,' Man Wrote

Ervin Lupoe's wife and children It was described as one of the most grisly scenes Los Angeles police had ever encountered: the bodies of five young children and their parents, all shot to death, in two upstairs rooms of the family's home.

"The reaction on their faces was not a pretty sight," neighbor Jasmine Gomez told CNN. "There was an officer who came out of the house throwing up."

But even more incomprehensible to some was the story that emerged after the bodies were found Tuesday: A father who, in a last desperate act after he and his wife were fired from their jobs, killed all six family members before turning the gun on himself.

In a letter faxed to Los Angeles television station KABC before his suicide, Ervin Antonio Lupoe blamed his former employer for the deaths, detailing his grievance against Kaiser Permanente's West Los Angeles Medical Center, where he and his wife, Ana, had worked as technicians.

Lupoe, 40, claimed the couple was being investigated for "misrepresentation of our employment to an outside agency for the benefit to ourselves's (sic), childcare." He said the initial interview was held on December 19, and when he reported for work on December 23, "I was told by my administrator ... that 'You should not even have bothered to come to work today. You should have blown your brains out.'"

"Oh lord, my God," the letter concludes. "Is there no hope for a widow's son?"

Kaiser Permanente said in a statement Tuesday night that although the company is "saddened by the despair in Mr. Lupoe's letter faxed to the media ... we are confident that no one told him to take his own life or the lives of his family." TheSun