Several years after I graduated from high school, one of my classmates killed his wife and children in the parking lot of a shopping center before turning the gun on himself.
While I was still in high school, a fellow student (i’ll call him Brad) brought a gun to school and held the principal hostage. Before he pulled the trigger, however, Brad called for his favorite teacher, who was contacted, went to the office, and was able to convince Brad to put the weapon down.
This could be my old friends verbatim, although I knew more than one guy who beat his wife or girlfriend, and I know two people who killed someone. One was justifiable legally (attempted rape), the other was not legally, although the victim was also a molester according to what I heard, and the person I knew spent a few years in jail. Most were just messed up punk kids, with a touch too much booze and way too much repressed anger.
I’m not completely rejecting the idea that someone I hang out with could be a violent abuser, but I don’t know about it if it’s happening.
One of my dad’s brothers was told by his father, pretty much from the day he was born, that he was a fuck-up. Not surprisingly, he lived up to everyone’s expectations.
First it was underage drinking. Then breaking into vending machines for the money. Then stealing cars. Then he violently raped his stepdaughters, and will be in an Illinois prison for the rest of his life.
I’d post you a link to the Illinois sex offenders website, but that would give away my last name.
Yes. It seems I might have narrowly escaped being an accessory to his violent crime, too. When I was 18 or 19 my boyfriend at the time called me late at night to ask me to come and pick him up. (Unbeknownst to me, he had a coke addiction…I was rather naive and didn’t know that extreme mood swings, constant sniffing, and a chronic lack of money might be signs of something not so great…I was a freshman in college and a weed smoker but shunned anything stronger so he hid it from me)
He sounded very strange. Anyway, I thought he asked me to pick him up at my former apartment (I had just moved and it was close to his apartment), not his apartment. So at about 1 a.m. I drove over to my apartment but did not see anyone. This was before cell phones were very common. I realized that he must have meant his apartment. I drove over there, about a 7-minute drive. By this time it was about 20 or 25 minutes since the time he had called. When I got to his apartment, I saw about six cop cars outside, lights blazing. From jail later he told me that he saw me drive by from the back of a cop car and told the cops that I was his girlfriend.
Apparently, he had gone with a knife to the house down the street with the idea to rob the occupants. He saw a woman in her nightgown and forced himself in and forced her to orally copulate him at knifepoint. Or maybe that was his plan all along, and he also needed money for coke. (Yes, for about ten thousand reasons it was really pleasant being known as, and knowing oneself as, the girlfriend of someone who was capable of this. I felt like Hitler’s girlfriend or something.) After committing this horrendous crime, he walked to his house and called me. If I had heard him right, or if he had told me the right location, I would have arrived there in time to pick him up. :eek: He had already lied and told me on the phone that he had been with his friend Keith. Sigh. He was so dumb that when he was walking outside after the crime, and the police came to the neighborhood to question people, he told the investigator which house the rape had occurred in. However, only the rapist and the girl’s friends and the cops knew at that point.
I went to his apartment the next day, to talk to his roommates, after I found out what had happened. I listened to his answering machine in humiliation as there were many calls from girls who were obviously involved with him. I actually went to visit him in the county jail because I decided to take “innocent until proven guilty” to heart and wanted to hear his side of it, and clung to some faint hope he hadn’t done it. He said the most ridiculous things, such as “I didn’t do it, but maybe I’m just in here for a reason.” Riggghhhht. That sounds like an innocent man. I left in disgust. He called me once from jail but I didn’t take any further calls. He got 10 years, but I just checked on the CA sex offender web site and it says that he’s still incarcerated. He was one of those really cute, charming (at first) guys…everyone was shocked at first. Yuck. I forgot some of those details and they came back while I was writing this.
At least eight of my students were or became murderers. I lost count after that. Their personalities differed quite a bit.
Carl seemed to me to be a sweet kid. He was a little restless. His main goal in life was to get a silver tooth with a diamond in it. He loved to look at Gentleman’s Quarterly. I had no discipline problems from him and he did his work. One of our football players humiliated him about something after school and Carl went home and got his gun and came back to school and shot him point blank.
John was quiet in class and generally indifferent. He seemed to have a very calm exterior. He was just putting in the time until graduation. On graduation night, after an argument, he shot and killed another one of my students.
Sharon was the only one that I taught that had already committed a murder. I tutored her after school so that she could get a credit. She was pleasant and witty. I didn’t ask her the details. I did not feel uncomfortable around her at all.
Kevin (quietly cold) gave me a lot of discipline problems including threatening to slit my throat. He was eventually sent to prison for murdering two customers outside one of Nashville’s favorite restaurants. He died in prison but I don’t know the cause.
LaSha was, I think, seriously mentally ill. I think that she had terrible mood swings and had a lack of control of her impulses. She was bright and could be very likeable or very frightening. The last time that I saw her, she was being removed from my classroom by a principal who was 6’7". She was very slender and small-boned and the principal was having to struggle. LaSha was screeching at the top of her lungs. It was chilling. She and a boyfriend later killed a man who owned or ran a grocery store. They then left in his vehicle and left their fingerprints all over it. She was in prison for a very long time and has been released in the last few years.
I don’t remember any details of the other murderers at the moment. I do know that they weren’t always the troublemakers in class.
I don’t know anyone who has ever been in jail or even been arrested of *any *crime (violent or otherwise.)
My grandmother had serial killer Joel Rifkin as a student in one of her classes one year. Though he would have only been around 10 or so.
I find this astonishing.
I’ve been working temps jobs for the last two years and I worked for awhile at a bail bonds agency, doing the office and research work.
The thing is most of these horribly violent people (all who had records) were pretty nice. I really couldn’t figure out why violent people get to make bail but they are offered the chance.
What I learned is bad people are actually pretty nice, as long as everything goes their way
One brother (manslaughter). Another brother (rape and assault). A sister (assault). Another sister (assault - but at a very young age). Another sister (assault). The rest of my extremely numerous siblings, AFAIK, are pretty much violence-free, which ain’t bad odds really.
Several acquaintances who committed rape; one acquaintance who beat some poor boy (who I also knew) to a pulp, got off with 6 months’ community service, and crowed about he’d done so well.
Nothing since I was about 17, though; I pick my friends more carefully now.
Sad story. No-one should be sent to prison for minor crimes like that - it puts you in impossible positions.
Good Lord. How did you cope with that?
Some (well, quite a lot) of my students have commited violent crimes, but none of them have actually murdered anyone. One of them went on to kill someone, that I know of, but there may have been more.
I wouldn’t say that they ‘weren’t always the troublemakers in class,’ though. They were. Perhaps that’s because they were all angry knife or beating crimes rather than quite, waiting, gun crimes like you describe. These kids were trouble in class, trouble out of class, and troubled elsewhere.
TBH, in some ways they’re easier to teach than the kids who are on the borderline.
I’m not sure. I tried to deal with it as best I could and I didn’t end up totally screwed up but I did a lot of things in my twenties, mostly with regard to men, that I regret now…and I know that particular experience did not do much for my self-esteem.
Most of the murderers I’ve known were my students. Hereis a newspaper article reporting on three of the most cold blooded. Briefly, Brian hired Pete and Trazis to murder his parents for him. They did.
The only violent one I knew was a guy I used to train in judo with. His girlfriend got tired of him beating her up, and shot him to death.
A childhood friend of mine is, or was, also under the care of Dr. Qadcop the Mercotan. He was never violent, and a pleasant enough guy to be around, but he would steal anything that wasn’t red hot or nailed down, and if he could pry it loose it wasn’t nailed down. He got away with stealing from his father and mother and uncle, but when he stole a lot more from another business he was working at, he was convicted of embezzlement and went to prison. When he got out, he got a job working as a valet, of all things, and surprise! stole a lot more from his employer. So, back to the Gray Bar Hotel. Then he was transferred to another prison because the people he got involved with in the first prison weren’t interested in hearing why he didn’t have any of the money he owed them, they just wanted to be paid.
He was one of these guys who looks for the easiest way to get money without actually working, and spends all his time and energy on it. He wrote to me from prison (trying to get money from me). Entertaining guy, as long as you didn’t believe a word he said.
Regards,
Shodan
Why? I come from a good neighborhood, was raised in a loving family, went to a good school, and the people who are the type to get into criminal trouble are not the type of people I would ever want to spend my time with.
That’s some mighty specific accusations on limeted experience!
Could you elaborate on your limited experience and qualifications to make such diagnoses?
Yes. Gang members, from low-ranking to higher ups. All male. Most came across as incredibly dumb though, at first glance, harmless. Their stupidity scared me more than violent pasts/presents – not just that they had the capacity to kill or be violent, but that they didn’t seem to possess much self-control or foresight. I guess they were good at what they did.
They joked and talked about sports and celebrity gossip and all that stupid shit, and went out to have a good time with drinks and strippers what have you, but honestly, they were miserable. Every one. Heart problems, broken families, paranoia. Just a horrible existence.
Why? I never met a criminal, either. Some people just come from sheltered backgrounds.
Used to be drinking buddies with this guy and his roommate. We were all mid-late 20s. we frequented a bar cross the street from what is now Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles.
This guy was a smaller version of Rob Lowe, all the girls loved him and the two of us, the girls noticed us not so much. Could be 10 of them, 3 of us, and it would be us two guys talking alone all night no matter what.
Both of them grew up in a small PA city, both from a upper middle class background, I wonder if this guy was maybe even lower upper class. Independently both moved back to Reading, Rob Lowe to do who knows what, other guy to work for Dad and marry the underage waitress at the bar he fell in love with the week I was on vacation.
Anyway a year or so goes by, stadium is being built. A bit of background on the neighborhood. The bar is 1 block exactly from the birthpakce of Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player ever. His father nce owned a bar in what was to become the outfield of the stadium. The Babe is best know as a Yankee of course, but he his a beloved son of Baltimore.
So there was a lot of talk, serious talk, when it came time to name the stadium, that it should be done in honor of The Babe’s considerable baseball exploits. It turned out that other options were chosen, but that was in the air, especially in that neighborhood at that time.
So a year or so goes by and I stop in one afternoon. Friendly manager pulls me over and says we just got a call and a fax from married guy today, did you hear?
“No what?”
“Rob Lowe guy is on the run and the cops are looking for him.”
Turns out he spent the year hooked up with some rich Arab chick from Princeton and they blew through as much money in coke and who knows all what else as they could. At first he borrowed from his family, there were some minor court cases as family accused him of stealing checks, stuff like that. Petty in a way, signs of trouble to come though.
Now a stolen check had turned up a supermarket, and Mom had orders in to not cash it, cal the police.
He bolted I guess. Not clear on the details from here, but between then and the time the call/fax came in that day, Mom was found stuffed in a chest in her living room or bedroom. Possibly cut up so we would fit, but I am not sure about that.
And now rob lowe and arab chick were no where to be found with , as they say in all the good songs, blood on their hands.
Local PA police thought they might be headed our way and we should be aware and keep a look out. Having grown up close to Princeton myself, I guessed they would head there.
Turns out I was right, they were picked up a few days later.
Now this miniature Rob Lowe fellow, lets call him 5’8 in his stocking feet, maybe 145 before hitting the coke, is surely spending life in prison doing very very hard time. I am sure he remains very popular there, although I am also sure it is not as much fun.
Don’t know what happened to Arab chick.
So all that time, the bar, with the Stadium about to open, was transitioning from a neighborhood place to a “just across the street from the ballyard” place.
I suggested, that since the City and State declined to honor The Babe, they might do it themselves. What better honor than to name the section where we used to hang out, by the front windows facing the best stadium in baseball, to name it in honor of Babe and his cohort’s most famous achievement and one of baseball’s most enduring team nicknames of the 1927 Yankees, why not call the section “Murderer’s Row”?
New folks would think it is an homage to The Babe, but insiders would know the truth…
Friendly owners and managers, that was the first an only time I ever saw them not have a sense of humor. I don’t know why!
:: reads link ::
:eek:
Holy crap! Even in my Evil Overlord incarnation, I have to say that is just overkill.
Yeah, that is not far from where I live. I moved here while that trial was in the news.
Last year I was doing some location scouting for a movie. Run-down trailer parks, collapsing barns, that kind of thing, remote rural roads. I saw a lot of those barrels in places where you ought not expect to see them. Times like that it is better not to know and to let ignorance win out.