What's important about a horrific slaughter aren't the violent deaths themselves, but what readers might conclude after reading about who inflicted the victims' excruciating ends. The Washington Post assured readers that their instinct to block crimethink was the right thing to do.

We can’t look away when bad things happen to rich people. Crime that afflicts the affluent always commands front pages, gobbles up airtime and goes viral on social media.

All week long, Washington’s news has been dominated by two awful crimes in upscale neighborhoods: the unsolved killings of wealthy Washington couple Savvas and Amy Savopoulos, their 10-year-old son and one of their housekeepers... [Why We’re Riveted When Bad Things Happen to Rich People, by Petula Dvorak, The Washington Post, May 18, 2015]

A housekeeper who sent her wages back to El Salvador in remittances. A drop in the multibillion-dollar bucket.

[T]he Savopouloses, who were active donors to social and political causes and who left behind two teenage daughters. Savvas, 46, was president and chief executive of American Iron Works, which helped build Verizon Center and CityCenterDC. Who killed them, set their house ablaze and stole their blue Porsche? We want to know just as badly as the police...

Meanwhile, thousands of regular, everyday people are killed in burglaries, in house fires and by family members. And the rest of the country rarely gives two hoots.

"People," such as the thousands of white women stalked, raped, and disfigured while being tortured by black men. Or Baltimore residents suffering from a dramatic increase of violent crime after fellow blacks rioted when a convicted heroin dealer died a week after being taken into police custody.

The race and class of victims undoubtedly play a role in this. And there’s something sad about that.

We shouldn’t place more value on a life if the victim was pretty or wealthy or white. A mansion fire shouldn’t be treated as more tragic than a rowhouse blaze. And a dead socialite should not be treated as more important than a dead prostitute. This isn’t #RichLivesMatter.

Likewise, the suspect shouldn't be treated as part of a pattern merely because he's a black immigrant with a long history of violent, incorrigible behavior, which another Washington Post article delicately describes as "brushes with the law."

Records filed in Prince George’s County District Court illustrate some of Wint’s long-standing brushes with the law. In the mid-2000s, four people — including his father and a housemate — petitioned for restraining orders, the records show. Not all requests were granted, but a judge did order Wint to stay away from his father for a year. [Suspect in Quadruple Killings Captured in D.C., Police Say, May 21, 2015]

Dvorak tells her liberal readers that they ought to be as concerned about the dregs of society that no one wants to be, as they are about the successful rich everyone dreams of, and strives to be.

And yet Dvorak, a clever and perceptive writer, missed the irony (in the Greek tragedy sense) when she condemned universities in 2014 for not expelling the apparent serial killer Jesse Matthew.

What is the magic number of attackers needed for universities to stop letting rapists roam their campuses? [...] We shouldn’t need a perfect victim and brutal attackers to talk about rape and demand real change in the way universities handle it.

The man arrested in the killing of U-Va. student Hannah Graham, Jesse Matthew Jr., twice withdrew from other Virginia universities after he was accused of sexual assault. Would Hannah still be alive if those universities — Liberty and Christopher Newport — had pursued criminal charges against him? [Why Did it Take a U-Va. Gang-Rape Allegation to Make Us Care About Campus Sex Assault?, The Washington Post, December 5, 2014]

Perhaps Hannah, and many other murder victims, would still be alive if liberal females like Dvorak didn't scold sensitive readers about the race and class of the perpetrators (pictured right: Jesse Matthew Jr.) and the slaughtered victims. Noticing certain murder trends is execrable, except when it's not, which is determined by liberal moods.