They had cameras...

...did they have alarms, too?

PENSACOLA, Fla. — Byrd and Melanie Billings had a growing brood of adopted children with autism, Down syndrome and other disabilities, and took care to make their nine-bedroom house a safe place for them, wiring it with surveillance cameras in every room.
It was those cameras that captured images of the masked men who shot the wealthy couple to death in a break-in executed with chilling precision.

Or how about any method of or plan for defense? Surely these people knew that with their wealth they'd be a juicy target to some people -- especially considering, as the story put it, that they lived in a "house set deep in the woods" -- where as the old saying goes, when seconds count the police are only minutes away. God only knows what the couple's odds would have been with the kind of operation detailed here, but at least they'd have had a fighting chance -- perhaps better than anyone could expect, considering that was their turf and that they knew it better than outsiders. The way it sounds here they were caught completely flat-footed. No doubt that camera footage will make it easier for a jury to give those creatures the needle, but ideally they'd have been put down like the rabid animals they were as they broke down the door.