Family Tragedy

Re “Sisters Shared a Husband and Tragic Family Secret,” June 21.

The Times effectively depicted major family dysfunction on the front page of the June 21 edition. . . . Heroically, your writers included the disclaimer, “Their lives, however, were not the average immigrant experience.”

So what’s this story doing on the front page of the Sunday Times? It’s newsworthy, all right, but not of the far-reaching consequences to us as a society that I anticipate as underpinnings of front-page news.

There is no trend occurring where Hispanic families share husbands or murder children. Your story reads like a tabloid, whetting appetites to read about sisters sharing a husband, tragic family secrets. Your choice to make an extensive front-page spectacle of this uncommon immigrant family, garnished with oversized photos inside the paper, fuels the fires of prejudice. What irresponsible message are you sending out about the Hispanic community, despite the commendable disclaimer buried deep in the coverage, that this family is different? You are serving a city that has already proven itself subject to racial tensions.

When you report catastrophic social failures within our minority populations, realize that many bigots eat this information raw and grow fatter with thoughtless hate. Responsible journalism should report the news and not splash it at us in a manner that will lead to false conclusions and generalizations.

You did a poor job in this case of only telling us about a family and their troubles. By running this story on the front page, you unfortunately communicated a gravity of a pandemic crime and didn’t contribute to the reality that most families of Hispanic origin living here in Los Angeles are law-abiding, hard-working citizens among whom the value of the family is not lost.

JONATHAN GREGORY, West Toluca Lake