A gunman who already had an active warrant for firing shots at a university campus walked into an Alabama home and executed a college student, a single father of three, and the family dog — and the system tasked with stopping him did nothing until it was too late. For ordinary Americans, this is the familiar math: warning signs flashing red, authorities slow-walking accountability, and innocent people paying the price.

De'Kendrick Crawford, 24, was charged with capital murder after Jazmine Alexis Bates, 22, and Jose Felix Alvarez-Duenas, 31, were found dead inside a Brookwood, Alabama, home on Monday. Bates was set to graduate from the University of Alabama in December. Alvarez-Duenas was a single father raising three kids. They were pet-sitting at the home when Crawford — a former co-worker who knew all the victims socially — targeted them for reasons police still cannot explain.

"They had done nothing wrong to him. None of his acquaintances know why this occurred," Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office Captain Jack Kennedy said Tuesday.

Here is what the system knew, and what it failed to act on: At the time of the murders, Crawford was already wanted for a firearm offense dating back to May, when he allegedly opened fire at a building on the University of Alabama campus after being terminated from a contracted construction job. He fired shots from a vehicle as he drove away, striking a building near Coleman Coliseum. He was not a university employee, just a contractor — but he was a known gunman on the loose, and apparently no one in law enforcement made catching him a priority until two more people were dead.

The homeowner, who was out of the country, spotted a suspicious figure on her back porch via security camera — the same technology the sheriff called "crucial" to identifying Crawford. When police arrived for a welfare check, they found Alvarez-Duenas dead on the floor just inside the front door. Bates was found in a closet in the back bedroom. The dog was killed too.

Crawford wasn't there. He was found 22 miles away at a relative's apartment in Northport. After a four-hour standoff involving drones, tear gas, breached walls, K-9 units, and searched attics, Crawford surrendered. "He cared more about himself than the victims," Kennedy said. He was denied bond Wednesday.

This is not an isolated failure. In Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Shavello Shakur Clark, 22, allegedly terrorized his ex-girlfriend for months — and the system let him escalate until he was firing gunshots at a moving vehicle. According to the Reading Eagle, Clark broke into the woman's home in March, ransacked it, and stole two semiautomatic firearms, a Glock 19 and a Taurus TH9. Weeks later, he allegedly used the stolen Taurus in an armed robbery at a Circle K. Then on May 13, he fired gunshots at his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend's vehicle in Norristown. Clark faces attempted murder, aggravated assault, stalking, robbery, and burglary charges — but only after months of escalation. His bail was set at $300,000 cash.

Two states. Two gunmen. Two trails of warning signs — campus gunfire in one case, a months-long campaign of stalking and armed robbery in the other — and two systems that waited for bodies before acting with any urgency.

The question isn't whether evil exists. It always has. The question is why institutions tasked with stopping known threats consistently fail until the body count forces them to pay attention.