For most Southern Californians, especially the residents of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties the month of February 2013 will not be remembered for the President's State of the Union Address, a memorable Valetine's Day celebration, or the unusually cold seasonal temperatures. For the period of six days, a former fired cop exacted a personal campaign of vengeance against those whom he determined had wronged him. He deliberately targeted members of his former law enforcement profession murdering a Riverside police officer, a San Bernardino Sheriff's deputy, an off-duty USC campus police officer, and wounding other officers by treacherous ambush and tactical assault in a very public, violent, and cowardly fashion. On the sixth day, this gunman was cornered through an intensive manhunt by the hounds of law enforcement and, when he could not find any more living targets to engage, perished it seems by his own hand.

The seeds of relentless demonic acts were sown by a depraved human mind; actions that reaped a harvest of fear and trepidation, misery and suffering, sorrow and sadness, pain and death. That is the calling card of evil. To call his behavior by any other name is a disservice to the law enforcement profession, especially those who were wounded, and those who perished, at his hands by virtue of their willing service to keep our communities safe. Let us no longer speak his name openly-now that he has been undone-lest his villainy garner the greater share of the spotlight in death that he could not hope to attain through his vane, vindictive, and vacuous life of criminality. Whatever grudge he might have held, accusation leveled at others, or injustice identified in his rambling manifesto-all was nullified by his own undoing.

Instead, we should remember the names of those lives he cut short and pray for their grieving families. We must honor the memory of those who were sacrificed or wounded on the altar of one man's vainglorious vengeance. Let our thoughts and actions continue to reflect virtue, goodness, kindness, and mercy so that God may judge between him and us, and not find us lacking.