On Sunday, around noon, two teenage boys were killed with machine guns in East Palo Alto.  The San Jose Mercury article says there have been 17 shootings in EPA since the new year.  In 2006, 7 were shot to death in EPA.  This is down from 15 in 2005.  Which is down from 42 in 1992. 

The Mercury News is notorious for only reporting on EPA when crime or violence has occurred there.  So I want to place the homicide rate in East Palo Alto in converation with the suicide rate among teens in Palo Alto.  The number is much harder to dig up as suicide in PA is less likely to make the headlines that guns in EPA make.  If anyone knows the exact number, please comment below.  What i do know is that by May of 2006, 7 people in Palo Alto and its adjacent affluent cities, placed themselves intentionally in front of a speeding Caltrain.  Two of them were teenagers.  And that Caltrain has the second-highest rate of "trespasser" fatalities among the nation’s 13 major commuter railroads from 1996-2005.  (The San Diego Northern Railway is numero uno.)