An old supervisor of mine (I only worked with her for a couple weeks before she got promoted) was recently murdered. I didn’t know her super well, but it’s still weird when I think about it. I mean, I know that lady. I’ve joked with her. Just a month ago, I ran into her and she wished me best wishes on my upcoming wedding. And now she’s not just dead, but murdered.
I’m trying to wrap my head around it and it’s really befuddling me. I don’t know what to make of it. I mean, I’m not depressed or emotionally devastated by it; I don’t need counseling. It’s not affecting my daily life. But when they talk about it on the news, I just get this weird feeling and I can’t quite fully comprehend it.
Has anyone been in this position? And advice for making sense of it?
My dearest friend from high school was murdered five years after we graduated. She was driving a taxi, down on her luck when some former classmates called the service she worked for one evening and asked for her to pick them up, saying that they remembered her from school and wanted to help her out. Instead, they made her drive to an isolated field and raped her before stabbing her repeatedly and running her over with her own car. The perps were all on serious drugs at the time, but it still defies belief to this day. She had two young children that she was struggling to keep custody of. Whenever I see them around town I have to choke back tears.
And the manager of a restaurant where I worked (with the aforementioned friend) was murdered one night while closing up. Perps never found. The police thought it might be a group of people whom he had kicked out earlier that evening who returned for retribution, based on the fact that the bank bag of receipts was left untouched on the counter.
Both murders were completely senseless, perpetrated on innocent people who were just doing their jobs at the time. After the second one, I quit trying to make sense of the mindless sh*t that goes on in some people’s thoroughly broken brains.
But I am sorry to hear about your former supervisor, Serenata67. All I really can advise you to do is keep her loved ones in your thoughts and do what you can to honor her memory.
In grade school the father of one of my friends was murdered and more recently a semi-distant member of my in-laws killed three members of his/our family.
I’ve known several people over the years who were murdered. You can’t make sense of it, not in the sense I think you mean. How you feel is how you feel, regardless of the intensity or lack of it.
I had a relative murdered many years ago. Murderer turned out to be a family ‘friend’. Even had the gall to help ‘console’ the mother during the weeks it took to out him.
You never make sense of it. Steals some of your light from the world that’s all.
I knew two people who were both murdered in in on the same day.
One was a girl who was in my small group at church (a group of about two dozen people.) I didn’t know her very well but we had spoken on occasion.
The other is actually similar to the OP’s story. She was one of the supervisors on duty on my first night working in one of the campus dining halls. For several months, she was one of my regular supervisors with whom I would work a couple of times a week. Around the start of my second semester of work, she was transferred to a different part of the dining hall, but I still saw her around.
As far as making sense of it goes, I really can’t offer much wisdom. I didn’t know either girl very well (having been, at best, “work friends” with one of them) but I still tear up ever now and then when the subject comes up. As much as I hate to say it, some things just don’t make sense.
One of the first was a good friend of mine in high school; she moved to Texas to pursue a modeling career. There is a serial killer already in custody and authorities believe he is responsible for her death also.
Another was a friend of my kids. He had been over to the house several times, had dated my daughter’s best friend, and was a game-playing buddy of my son’s. He was murdered by the ex-boyfriend of his fiancee. The man stabbed him while he slept - I think he was stabbed something like 17 times.
As others have said, your feelings are going to be all over the place. And nothing about it is going to make sense, ever.
I always hear about other people who have family members murdered, and then they try to get laws passed to outlaw the weapon.What the heck is that about?
I can honestly say that it never occurred to me to try to get congress to outlaw the weapon that murdered my uncle.
For the record, my uncle was brutally murdered by beaten to death in the head with an iron frying pan.
It was not “the frying pan” that killed my uncle, it was a a very bad person who did it.
No…I dont want any laws passed to outlaw frying pans.
(They did catch the guy and he is in prison, for now…but I hope everyone here knows that the average actual time served in prison for murder in the United States is only 96 months. )
My junior high best friend’s step-sister was murdered when I was in 7th grade. Her father was recently convicted of the crime. I never met either her father or her sister, so the answer is technically ‘‘no.’’ That’s the closest I’ve ever been to murder, thank Og.
I found out years after the fact that a 10th grade friend was murdered two years after we graduated from high school. By his girlfriend, who then killed herself, too.
When I was in ninth grade, they found a former neighbor - he’d lived one house down from my family - and the parent of a girl in my grade shot dead in his pickup truck, two bullets in his head.
He was an alcoholic and drug addict and small-time wannabe dealer. He was severely abusive to his wife and kids until she finally left him about a year prior to his death. He beat his dog. Rumor had it he’d hurried his own mother’s death along when she was sick. When I was five he committed arson and insurance fraud by “accidentally” burning his house down. He’d done a couple stints in jail for selling stolen cars, possession, and I’m sure some assault and battery. Eventually he expanded his horizons and tried to become a bit player in organized crime, and apparently something went wrong with either that or one of his drug deals, and he wound up dead in a parking lot across the street from my high school.
Shockingly, not a single person was surprised or upset at his demise. Some people do get what they deserve.
Yes, two people. One was a student of mine many years ago–the first year I taught, in fact, right out of college. She graduated and went to college and was sleeping in her first-floor dorm room when someone came in through the window and stabbed her. Apparently she bled to death over the course of the night.
Another one was just a few years ago, right before Thanksgiving. It may have been just last year, although I think it was the year before. One of my ex-husband’s best friends owned a pawn shop, and someone came in to rob him and our friend got his gun out, and the thief got a hold of the gun and shot our friend in the head.
Six violent-murdered-by-others well enough to grieve over. Ten if you count self-murder/suicide. It will never make sense to me.
I didn’t really need help getting beyond (not “over”) the different events but I did find little bits of pieces of the puzzle here and there that helped me make some sense. Reading some of the stuff on the various The Compassionate Friends websites helped some. Best advice is to do the same - spot the little pieces that work for you.