Two events converged this past week. One involved the rocket-like trajectory of popular commentary on the new book by Kay Hymowitz, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys. From the Wall Street Journal to Pajamas Media, writers were writing and readers were venting.

The other event was a very local one. You won't have heard about it unless you live in the "Inland Empire" of southern California. It happened shortly after midnight on February 23rd, a few miles from my home. A young man left a party in a pickup truck he had casually stolen off the street, ran a stop sign, and changed the course of a dozen lives, including his own. The police estimate he was going 60 miles an hour. I know the intersection; it's in a residential area where drivers usually go 25 mph because there's a stop sign at every other corner.

A friend was with him in the truck. As they blasted into the intersection, they hit another truck with so much force that both vehicles spun and rolled and skidded into the front yard of a home. The driver of the second truck, 44-year-old Luciano Cervantes, was killed instantly. His wife and three children were trapped in the truck and had to be extracted by an emergency crew; Luciano and his wife had been taking their children to stay with friends so they could go to their nighttime job cleaning a theater.

The friend in the stolen truck was thrown from the cab. Witnesses saw the driver crouching over him, desperately calling "Chris! Chris!" Unresponsive, Chris died later in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The driver fled on foot; a nurse who lives nearby, rushing to the wrecked vehicles, heard him shout "Oh, God!" and saw him limp off into the night.

He was arrested hours later when the police found him in the garage of Chris's home. He had to be treated for injuries after he deliberately bashed his head on the squad car while he was being handcuffed. Alcohol may have been involved.

The Los Angeles news affiliates had video footage of Luciano Cervantes' grieving family. In his photo, he looks like a man any of us might know: stalwart, honest, approaching middle age with a twinkle in his eye. His youngest daughter, whom he called "Little Princess," hasn't quite accepted that he is gone. "He's in heaven," the family tells her. His sister, choking back tears, acted as family spokeswoman with the local media. "He was such a good father, you know? A good brother. We all depended on him. Things happen for a reason, you know, but I just . . . I don't know." His wife asked for privacy as they recovered from shock and injury.

Their lives will never be the same. And the 25-year-old driver, who was leaving a party—and doing, without a thought, what so many young men do every day—will have the deaths of two of his fellow men on his conscience for the rest of his life. The lives of his family, and the family of his friend Chris, are shattered.