Families

IT was the perfect cast for an uplifting reality TV show: five orphaned siblings and the loving family friends who took them in. The story line certainly appealed to the producers of ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." After learning that Phil and Loki Leomiti had opened their doors to the Higgins clan -- their former neighbors and fellow church members -- the show's executives proposed transforming the couple's modest Santa Fe Springs house into a nine-bedroom showpiece.

Pancho Real was at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church with his wife and daughter one Sunday in October 2006 when his cellphone rang. He was summoned to a park near his home on Drew Street, a drug and gang haven in Northeast Los Angeles, to kill a man he didn't know. The Mexican Mafia wanted a paroled Avenues gang member named Frank "Kiko" Cordova dead. Real left church with his family and called another gang member, Carlos Renteria. At the park that afternoon, they figured out who Cordova was but saw he was among children.

The call comes: Mom, Dad, Aunt Mildred and Uncle Joe are coming to visit. "We'll have so much fun, honey," Mom says over the phone. "We can all go to Disneyland and the beach! Even Fido's coming along so the kids will have someone to play with." Although you manage to say, "That's great, Mom," your head is already aching. Relatives, here, for a week. The house is a wreck, the kids are whining about being bored and you've got tons of work at the office.

Imagine inheriting a legacy that helped define the look of the 20th century. Imagine owning a house known as one of the great masterpieces of Modernist architecture. Imagine being asked to keep alive the spirit of invention that engendered all of this. This is the responsibility that befell Lucia Eames and her offspring on Aug. 21, 1988, the day her stepmother, Ray Eames, died, 10 years to the day after the death of Lucia's father--Ray's design partner and husband--Charles Eames.

Poor, poor little rich boy Gordon Clune. Poor little starving Gordon Clune. --excerpt from a PBS Net forum about "Frontier House" The widely seen PBS reality series "Frontier House" captured the many sides of Gordon Clune and his Malibu family. It caught their whining side, complaining side, feuding side and cheating side.

Moving from bedroom to bedroom, an attacker slashed and stabbed five members of a much-admired Pico Rivera family early Friday, killing the father, two sons and a daughter and wounding the mother as they slept, authorities said. The floors of the Flores family's neatly kept yellow house in the 9600 block of Marjorie Street were streaked with blood when Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies arrived.

OH, those little sisters can be pesky. Just ask Avery Lopez, 7, who shares a bedroom with one. She and Sophia, 5, sometimes squabble over toys or who won a game. "When she's in the room," Avery declares, "she's loud." But both sisters say they would rather share than separate. "If I had my own room," Avery says, "it won't be as fun." The sentiment is sweet -- and increasingly old-fashioned.

As far back as Fannie Johnson can remember--and that's all the way back to World War I--her family has dutifully heeded the nation's call to arms. "I was little, but I remember my relatives being in that war," said Johnson, sitting erect in her favorite chair by the front window. Fighting in France during the war was Ernest Johnson, a fellow destined to be her first husband.

Vincent Brothers will attend the funeral of his slain wife, mother-in-law and children here today as a man in limbo. To his lawyer, Brothers is a grieving husband and father. To the Bakersfield police, he remains the sole suspect in the killings, which they say are among the most gruesome in the city's history.

Townspeople turned out by the hundreds Saturday to mourn nine of the 18 people killed in a massacre two days earlier that authorities have linked to feuds over drug trafficking in the area around the resort city of Ensenada.