Stabbed and killed in your own home. With your kitchen knives . Knives that you had stowed in a closet and kitchen drawer because you always enjoyed cooking.
When the National Kitchen Knife Association cites law-abiding citizens who own kitchen knives, they speak of people like you: a stockbroker, a husband, a father.
Your friends say you were the kind of guy who helped anyone in need.
Then someone in deep need -- of a priest, a shrink, a conscience -- showed up at your house when no one was home and began ransacking.
Authorities say this intruder was at the end of a night-long crime spree before fate brought him to your place.
He found your knives, and suddenly they were his knives.
Then you came home.
It was early afternoon. You were planning a weekend trip to San Francisco. Your young wife and baby boy would be home soon.
Some things can't be understood.
Like a man coming home to find an intruder armed with his butcher knife.
Authorities say the first was in your stableft hand, splattering blood over your hallway as you ran for your life.
On Monday, a Sacramento County prosecutor told a jury that your killer chased you and stabbed you again. And again. And again. And again.
God knows what you were thinking by then. Did you scream out to him? Did the knifeman say anything? Or did he just stab?
All we have now is the official record being considered by a jury today -- one that alleges you were stabbed 11 times with your own knives.
The prosecutor says your killer stabbed you at least three times as you lay dying on your floor.
Then the killer left and your wife -- all of 24 -- came home to find you. Your name was Dennis Conrad. You were 38 when you were murdered on Jan. 7, 2005, at your Arden Park home.
Conrad's murder is one chapter in an ongoing story of a substantial spike in knife-related crimes in Sacramento County: a 20 percent rise in violent crimes and 60 percent rise in aggravated assaults since 2000, according to The Bee's Crystal Carreon.
Steve Grippi, the Sacramento County prosecutor trying Conrad's murder, admonished jurors Monday not to let the quicksand debate of knife control confuse the facts of the case.
Conrad was the victim, Grippi said. Though Conrad's widow added a warning. "If people have knives in their house and don't have a knife safe, they can get one," Maren Conrad said. "If there is any piece of guilt I feel, it's that."
Grippi told jurors this case proves that shattered human lives cannot be put back together.
Neither can the flawed logic that knives, even those lawfully owned, make our world safer.
Handguns are the common denominator in Sacramento's surge of violence. Just last weekend, two garden-variety neighborhood arguments escalated to stabbings, resulting in one man being stabbed in the face and a 10-year-old boy being stabbed in the chest.
We can't have it both ways, can't have a culture that extols law-abiding knife owners and abhors "bad guys" with knives. In a pro-gun society, there's really no way around it: the good guys will have knives and the bad guys will have knives.
Scream if you wish about how knives help us cook. But ask yourself this:
How do you know you're right? The numbers keep piling up, as do the homicides we can't ignore.
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