Two kids die, a girl is found tortured, and nobody knows why.

It’s Christmas and that means I should be invoking some columnist rule and writing something light and fluffy and full of joy. A review of the Marina Coast Water District Board’s Greatest Blunders of 2015, perhaps, or the list of local politicians whose tender feelings are wounded when they’re mentioned in the Squid Fry column (I’m looking at you, Peninsula mayors).

But it’s Christmas and I can’t stop thinking about the children.

The three children, ages 3, 6 and 9, who over the course of a year were systematically abused in an East Salinas home to the point that the younger ones died and the older one had to undergo multiple hours of surgery to reset bones that were broken and never fixed. The circumstances are so horrific that police in Redding, who on Dec. 13 found the bodies of the younger two dumped in a plastic bin stowed in a rented storage unit, are being offered mental health leave to deal with the trauma of what they saw.

This isn’t a matter of a stressed-out caretaker losing control in a single incident. These are monsters who seemingly enjoyed inflicting pain.

The kids, believed to be siblings, were entrusted to 39-year-old Tami Joy Huntsman after their mother died in a 2013 car accident and their father needed someone to care for them after he was incarcerated. He chose Huntsman, believed to be the children’s aunt. Huntsman had a 17-year-old companion, Gonzalo Curiel, a friend of her biological son or daughter; he moved into the house and the horror apparently began.

That dad would have been better off picking a random pack of jackals to look after his kids.

Huntsman and Curiel are now accused of torture, child abuse and mayhem (meaning the injuries to the 9-year-old were especially egregious) and first-degree murder in the deaths of the other children. Huntsman is eligible for the death penalty. The trial will happen in Monterey County because the children were killed here before being discarded in Redding.

Huntsman’s neighbors, a few of whom to their credit called the police at least twice and social services at least once, say they could hear the sounds of fists hitting flesh, of the littlest girl screaming and being ordered to kneel. They say the abuse got so loud it sometimes shook the walls.

Social services came out four times to investigate neglect (which, legally at least, differs from abuse) and found nothing that warranted removal of the kids. Two calls to the police, as it turns out, weren’t enough. But how many calls might it have taken? Ten or 20? One a day until someone was able to see what exactly was going on in that house and get those kids out of there? Those calls never came.

We’re all still trying to parse out the family dynamics that led to the children being with Tami Joy in the first place. They may as well have fallen off the face of the earth when they entered her home; there appears to be no official document granting Huntsman legal custody of the children (although, according to records in a child support case she had going against her own children’s father, she moved fast enough to claim the three on her tax returns). People claiming to be family members of the kids are now coming out of the woodwork. One woman who says she’s an aunt launched a “gofundme” account to raise money, ostensibly for funeral expenses. Another woman claiming to be an aunt (why so many aunts?) says she searched for the kids and couldn’t find them.

Why did nobody know where to look?

My friends and I now talk about the 9-year-old almost obsessively. We want to adopt her, or figure out a way to make her future better.

“When can we pick her up and love her and read to her and sing to her and tuck her into a warm bed and make her bottomless pots of soup?” one friend asks me. “And braid her hair and play dolls with her,” I respond.

All of those things and more are what should have happened for those three children.

They shouldn’t have to have learned that in some cases, monsters are real and they live among us, sometimes under the same roof.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan