Leon P Jordan

Shortly before Christmas 2022, Dominique Ward made an unplanned stop at Target to do some last-minute shopping with her 3-year-old daughters. She was miles from her home, in a neighborhood where she didn’t know a single person. She assumed no one there knew her or her girls, either — until the following day when someone sent her a screenshot of a Facebook page belonging to the girls’ father. He had posted “an open letter” to his daughters, identical twins he had been barred from contacting without court supervision after multiple allegations of abusive behavior toward their mother.

For a pair of schoolteachers crammed into a rental with their children, the house for sale in Sun Valley was a dream come true: a modern hacienda with three bedrooms, fireplaces, exposed beams and an open kitchen on half an acre of lush landscaping, with fountains, an orchard and views of the Verdugo Mountains. “It was so beautiful,” recalled Elena Malone, a history teacher at the private Campbell Hall School, of visiting the property in the northeast San Fernando Valley in 2021. She and her husband, a math teacher at the Buckley School, could barely afford the $1.2-million price. But when she imagined her son and daughter growing up with plenty of space and abundant natural beauty, it seemed worth it.