A friend of mine was knifed in a common street mugging several years ago for less than $30 and a cheap watch. It was after midnight and he was wearing all black and fell on the street beside his car on a quiet, residential dead end street, by the time he was found, he had bled out.
The killer was never caught. It’s presumed that it was just a crime of opportunity as there wasn’t any sort of mugging spree in the neighborhood or anything. My friend’s wife and young son ended up in severe financial straits afterward and lost just about everything.
I have friends who died in the embassy bombings in Africa. Two were a colleague and his son, who was working as a summer hire when the bombing took place. It is still very upsetting to realize that it could just have easily been me or my family members.
Another colleague’s daughter disappeared when she was in high school and is presumed to have been murdered.
It definitely was an interesting story, and one that has touched my son and I and countless others here in Tucson that knew Dr. Stidham. It’s become so cliche to make murder victims out to be great, selfless, kind, give-you-the-shirt-off-their-backs saints, almost, but in this case it’s really true- Brian Stidham was an extremely gentle and kind man and outstanding in his field, and didn’t deserve to die so cold-bloodedly. And I can tell you that when we used to see Dr. Schwartz, I instinctively did not like him and I could tell that his staff was scared of him- you could tell something was not right there.
I hear he’s having a really hard time in prison, poor thing.
**1–**My friend blew his girlfriend away with a shotgun because she had an affair with his dad (I was about 20 at the time and this was two doors away from my row-home/townhouse).
**2–**I had a friend killed (shot) over a parking spot in Philadelphia [such stories are not unheard of]. (I was about 23 at the time and this was a couple of blocks from home)
**3–**I had a friend killed (stabbed with screwdriver) when he played on the ‘wrong’ basketball court. It was a racially motivated slaying at the nearest playground. I was about 8 at the time.
I grew up in Philadelphia, Pa. Bad neighborhood. I had a couple of classmates killed, too, but they weren’t friends, per se.
In 1972 my six year old cousin was murdered. He was playing near a ball field near his house and some nut case grabbed him, took him in the woods and strangled him, then bashed in his head with a building brick.
You don’t make sense of it. You just accept that there are x number of insane people in the world and there is a small but finite probability that one of them will cross paths with someone that you know and that will be the someone that they kill.
Two years ago, a severely mentally ill man got into a loud argument with his mother, then shot and killed her. Hearing the gunshots, the next door neighbor instructed his wife, 9yro daughter, 4yro daughter, and 14yro son (one of my former 6th graders) to hide in the bedroom while he stood guard at the front door. Inexplicably, the shooter broke into their house through the bedroom window. He killed the mother and 4yro little girl, then riddled the 14yro’s body with bullets. The 9yro was only grazed.
I knew the mother from parent conferences…and I have a hazy memory that she may have brought the murdered little girl (then an infant/toddler) with her.
The boy has been on life support several times since. He’s alive, but has had several life threatening infections. I’ve lost track of the family and I’m not sure how he is now. I attended a fundraiser for the family–the dad works at a car wash–and try to go there when I can and leave a check for the family each time.
This absolutely makes no sense, and never will. The mentally ill shooter, after his murderous rampage, simply walked out into the street, dropped the gun, and waited for police to come arrest him.
My best friend from grade school was murdered. I only found out by watching the news. Strange how we lose track of people so close to us.
She was delivering pizza. It wasn’t even her job, she was doing it as a favor to her son who was off somewhere. Some scumball bashed her head in with a hammer at one of her stops.
At least they caught the guy. It was some druggie needing a fix.
I get a wisp of regret when I think about her and how she died. We didn’t part on good terms. Our parents quarreled, and that was that. We couldn’t see each other, and by that time she lived far away.
I did my junior year abroad with a girl who was later killed in a terrorist attack. We weren’t close friends, but I knew her fairly well and was shocked to see her picture in the paper.
When I was a teenager, a mentally-disturbed man killed a dentist who was a friend of my parents; I knew Dr. S. only slightly, but he always struck me as a nice guy who liked to laugh. I don’t know how the killer happened to pick Dr. S., or if it was entirely random. He waited in the small, otherwise-empty lobby of the building where both my dad and the dentist had their offices, and shot Dr. S. in the head as he walked past. The guy later told police that “the voices” told him to do it. There’s still a small memorial plaque in the lobby to mark the spot. Through a friend of a friend, then-President Reagan heard about the murder and handwrote Dr. S.'s widow a very nice note.
A childhood friend of mine is an Army officer who was on duty in the Pentagon on 9-11, and although it was his part of the building that was hit, he was able to get out unscathed.
A friendof mine who was a Police Officer was killed by a fleeing felon.
My first apartment upon moving out of my parent’s home had this guy as the previous tenant.
I stopped telling girls after a while, since none of them wanted to come see my etchings when they learned the details…
You don’t want to get shot in the face. A big news story here several years ago was that a toddler was shot with a BB gun by some dumbasses driving around shooting at random people from a car. The kid was in his stroller.
The BB went in through the toddler’s eye socket and was lodged in his brain. IIRC, the kid was very, VERY lucky and is OK. IIRC, the BB was left in his head and his eye was okay. The dumbass teenagers were arrested for weapons offenses.
A quick Google looking for the above story, also mentions a teenager in the UK being killed in a similar way. The pellet went into his brain through his right eye.
My wife’s cousin was shot to death about six months ago. She had bad taste in men.
My folks were pretty good friends with a couple down the block. The husband suggested wife-swapping to my dad, and my folks cut off the acquaintance.The couple subsequently divorced, and the wife moved to Florida and re-married. Her stepson had a serious drug problem, and when she wouldn’t give him money, he shot her.
Someone I trained in judo with was shot to death, but it wasn’t murder, exactly - he was beating her up.
A few decades ago a teenager (I think 15 or 16, too young to drive) in our neighborhood was killed. She told her family she was going “out,” and never came home. In a day or two her body was found in the woods about a quarter mile from home. The crime is still unsolved. Didn’t help that her parents had no idea where she might have been intending to go, or who she was planning to be out with. Very sad. It happened in October and there was NO door-to-door trick or treating in our neighborhood that year.
My second cousin, who I wasn’t close to but had met several times, was probably murdered by her husband. He had a history of behaving violently towards her, but when she turned up dead at the bottom of the stairs having “fallen and hit her head” they couldn’t prove it wasn’t an accident.
I don’t personally know anyone, but I had some of the same feelings as the OP about the Zantop murders. When I think about their friend popping in for dinner the way I do at my friends’ all the time (doors aren’t locked) and finding that–and I feel so bad for them trying to help out kids who came to their door, like people would be likely to around here. It’s just horrible to think about, and so senseless.
One was a girl I knew in high school. Very shy, very quiet type. Right after I graduated college, she emailed me just to say hi. Next thing I heard, she had been murdered in a hotel room in Los Angeles (I think). Supposedly it was a pretty grisly scene but I never heard the details.
Another was a former coworker who was shot to death in Chicago sometime in 2008. Turns out it was a case of mistaken identity. What a bummer - if I’m going to be murdered, I want the person doing it to be doing it intentionally. In this case, he was the wrong guy and it was only a couple of days before his 30th birthday.
