When a family of four was found dead this month in their Westwood Highlands home, it was a devastating shock to a neighborhood where violence is rare and houses are worth millions. As more details of the likely murder-suicide case leaked out through news reports, those who knew the victims expressed horror and disbelief at the tragic fate of a seemingly “normal” family.
But seeing the police tape outside 930 Monterey Blvd. left me with a different feeling: eerie familiarity. I’d been welcomed into that same home just months before by the family whose lives were soon to end there.
Though the medical examiner’s office has yet to release autopsy results, newly uncovered details explain some of what happened to married couple Thomas Russell “T.R.” Ocheltree and Paula Truong, and their daughters, Alexandra, 12, and Mackenzie, 9. According to police and family sources, the two girls and their father had been shot and were found dead in their beds on Oct 8.
Police found the body of Truong hanging in the garage by a rope.
Two days prior, Truong had met a member of Ocheltree’s family at the front door of the home. The family member was concerned because T.R. wasn’t answering his phone, but Truong wouldn’t let the relative inside, saying her husband was on a golf trip and had misplaced his device.
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Fearing something was wrong, the relative returned on Oct. 8, broke into the home, and discovered the four inside.
Friends and neighbors remembered the Ocheltree-Truong family as private but pleasant, with the murmur of their garden dinners occasionally audible over the fence. They had a fluffy white dog named Mango, who was not found in the home, but who a friend of the family confirmed “is safe.”
T.R. and Paula were serial entrepreneurs who owned, at different times, a luxury vehicle repair garage, a high-end liquor store, and a chain of Vietnamese coffee shops. Unbeknownst to most people who knew them, they were also struggling financially, with multiple businesses failing and debt continuing to mount.
Truong’s friends knew her as an avid cook and baker. Karen Lam, a friend and Sunset Elementary teacher, said Truong had plans to undertake an hours-long process of simmering pho for her daughter.
Jim Wysocki, who began teaching golf lessons to Truong and her family roughly a year ago, said she’d often bring him food she had prepared — muffins, cookies, pasta, and, most frequently, freshly squeezed orange juice — as a gift. Neither Truong nor her husband spoke to him about anything but golf, he said.
My experience with Truong was both alarming and mundane.
After Truong emailed The Standard this spring offering a story tip, I began emailing with her. I received a text from her on April 30 claiming that when Alexandra was in fourth grade in 2023, a student in a different class tried to poison a friend. She accused the school of “keeping it quiet.”
Truong invited me to visit her Monterey Blvd. home the following day, on May 1, to hear about another alarming allegation she wished to share. She claimed that a parent was filming children on the playground at Sunset Elementary School, where her younger daughter was a third-grader.
She greeted me at the door around 4:30 p.m. and ushered me through the entry into the kitchen to the left. She was in the middle of making cookies, and there were baking sheets and mixing bowls spread on the island.
Sitting at a round dining table with a vase of flowers in the middle, I could hear a children’s TV show playing in a room at the other end of the house. There was no indication that the family had lost their seemingly idyllic home to foreclosure two months prior.
Truong was the main engine behind the couple’s business operation, and the home was held in her name. A member of T.R’s family said that her husband was unaware of the scale and desperation of the financial issues that had begun to arise for the family.
I met with a teacher at the elementary school during my visit. Truong had asked the teacher to come over to speak with me because of negative interactions they had with the parent Truong accused of filming children at recess. A screenshot of a report from Sunset Elementary that Truong texted me said there was “no evidence of inappropriate...videotaping of children on the schoolyard.”
As I was about to leave, Truong mentioned that one of her daughters had an issue with a teacher at her school and asked me if I was interested in speaking to her about it. I agreed, and shortly after, T.R. and Alexandra joined me in the kitchen. The then-sixth-grader kept quiet while her dad said they weren’t interested in speaking until after the school conducted an investigation.
I couldn’t corroborate Truong’s allegations, so I chose not to pursue the story any further, but in the days that followed, we stayed in contact through text and email. Reading the dozens of messages she sent to me now — weeks after the family’s death — is unnerving.
Less than two hours after I left her home, Truong texted me, at 10:51 p.m., claiming that school staff had been told that the man accused of filming students was in some way armed. She expressed concern about whether her child was safe.
She sent the same message to me again around 30 minutes later.
Over three days, Truong sent me more than 100 texts detailing everything from planned meetings between parents and Sunset Elementary’s principal to allegations against the school’s staff to plans for a teacher sick-out protest that failed to materialize.
In light of what later transpired, those assertions were perhaps an early warning sign. Truong initially appeared to me as an impassioned, if somewhat neurotic, mother with an intense concern for her children’s safety. But in retrospect, one can see shades of something darker.
The last text she sent me read “thank you !!! for shinning light for those who might not have a voice or don’t know how to.”
In the three weeks since the Ocheltree-Truong family’s bodies were discovered, there has been no official update from police. A prayer service organized Oct. 22 by Saint Finn Barr’s Church outside the home was attended by 11 parishioners, none of whom knew the family.
The day before the prayer service, Wysocki was practicing at the Cypress Driving Range in Colma. During a break between thwacking golf balls hundreds of yards, he said he was bewildered by how the family he’d gotten to know over the past year could suddenly vanish in such a heartbreaking manner.
“I just want closure,” he said. “I want to know what happened.”