Butler County and the rest of Western Pennsylvania are wrapped up in preparations for the coming holidays.

However, the case involving a 22-year-old Beaver Falls woman who was shot to death on the afternoon of Dec. 8 over a request to bum a cigarette is cause for people to pause from those preparations and consider what lies beneath that horrendous killing.

Friday’s deadly shootings at a Connecticut elementary school provide further cause for concern about what is happening in people’s lives and minds and how the attitudes within some communities eventually breed such violence.

What was going on within the families and lives of the three Beaver Falls youths — two aged 14 and one 13 — implicated in the murder of Kayla Peterson, the mother of a 1-year-old girl? Did those teens have little or no parental supervision where respect for others was instilled and emphasized?

What is the atmosphere and attitude within the Beaver Falls community that provided a window for the horrific crime? Beaver Falls isn’t a major metropolitan area where such crimes are more common.

Is there laxity on the part of the law enforcement community there that allows such individuals to roam and terrorize the streets, even at such a young age?

Perhaps the basic question emanating from this death is whether people are as safe living and working in Beaver Falls as they might have envisioned.

Unfortunately, such incidents can happen anywhere — even in Butler County. That’s why it’s important for local communities to remain vigilant about dangerous, threatening conduct by individuals of any age.

Still, in the eyes of many people, it’s mind-boggling how some young people can turn into murderers at such an early age.

And, in the Peterson killing, how was the shooter able to obtain the gun used in the murder?

In the case of Kayla Peterson, she made the mistake of yelling at the teens to get a job and stop trying to bum cigarettes. To many people, that such a tragedy would occur during daylight hours is even more unfathomable.

Newtown, Conn., where Friday’s mass killing occurred, is faced with questions similar to those facing Beaver Falls but on a much larger scale. What could have gone so wrong that a young man would feel compelled to kill his mother, then enter an elementary school, where he would massacre 20 children and six adults before turning a gun on himself? The rampage was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by 2007’s Virginia Tech massacre.

It’s the holiday season, when joy should be prevailing, but there’s too much sadness and tragedy.