My grandfather owned a small cafe in a tiny Southern town for many years. He served food, sold notions and groceries, had a pool table in the back. He was a kind and generous man, well-known and well-loved. A couple of ex-cons, one a local guy, killed him with a meat ax because of the money they believed he had in the safe in his office.
A cousin, the only one in his very troubled family to go to college and look forward to a brighter future, was shot and killed by his girlfriend when he was 23. Ironically, his older brother is serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole because of the murder of a bank customer during a robbery. He was 19 when he was sentenced.
My brother-in-law was killed in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He was visiting a client and pulled into the garage just behind the van that contained the bomb.
We had a very good friend who was a chef/restaurant owner and was attacked in his open kitchen by an employee high on crack/cocaine. Patrons & employees in the restaurant tried to subdue the attacker, but were unable to prevent the multiple stab wounds inflicted on our friend. He lingered for months, suffering, finally dying. The murderer was confined for a few years due to his “sickness” (drug abuse) and is now back out in society.
My husband’s best friend from elementary school murdered his own mother a couple of years ago–Mr. HP says it’s a wonder nobody killed her years ago. 50 years ago she was a monster.
A former co-worker’s wife, who I had met on many occasions was one of the postal workers killed in the massacer in Goleta four years ago. She was the sweetest person that you could ever imagine.
The best man at my wedding in 1995 was an old friend. We’d drifted apart over the years. A few years ago, he was dating a woman who was separated from her abusive husband. The husband came to the door with a shotgun and murdered Marty. I still regret never reconnecting with him.
I’ve had three co-workers murdered, one of whom was also a friend. He was the hardest, because I’d see/talk to him on a regular basis and when I learned he’d been killed, it was just surreal. I kept expecting him to walk in the door anytime, same as always, and I had to keep telling myself that just wasn’t going to happen any more.
Also, all of them were gay, and being gay had something to do with why each of them was murdered. I’ll never understand it either.
A woman I dated once was killed years later in her bedroom, apparently in front of her two-year old child. Her ex-husband was suspected but I don’t believe was ever arrested.
A friend of mine from high school was a fire chief who died on 9/11 in one of the World Trade Center towers.
The owner of a small hotel I stayed at in Puerto Rico was later killed by someone he had a dispute with who broke in, tied him up, and set him on fire.
A kid who worked as a guide at a nature reserve in Madagascar where I stayed for a couple of months was killed several years later by other people in the village. He ended up making lots of money as a guide, and began lording it over everyone else. They became jealous, and began throwing stones at him one day. They knocked him from a bridge into a river where he drowned.
A worker at the field station where I work in Panama was shot and killed during a mugging.
I didn’t know them personally, but my sister-in-law’s niece and nephew were killed by their father in a murder-suicide in order to get back at his ex-wife (my sister-in-law’s sister). He had them over night, and ran a gas hose into the bedroom where they all were sleeping.
My next-door neighbor, who I played with as a kid, was part of a group that beat a neighborhood drug dealer to death. He did six years for second degree murder.
The father of one of my best friends in grade school killed his wife and left her body in their basement storage locker after she asked him for a divorce, then killed himself and washed up on the beach a few days later. It was horrible - they had 4 kids together, the oldest of whom (my frend) was a college freshman at the time. I found out via the 5:00 news.
No, we never did make sense of it. I’d lost touch with the friend by the time all this happened, and haven’t seen her since. The whole town took up a collection for the kids, and one family even took the younger ones into their home. But it boggled me - I had stayed over at heir house when I was little, and Joseph Mabwa had always seemed like the nicest man - he used to come to our grade school during African History Month and tell Swahili folk tales. He always had a smile on his face, and that lovely, lilting Kenyan accent.
When I was in college, there was a girl who hung out with me and my friends. Nobody really thought of her as a close friend, she was just sort of always there. After I moved to NYC, I heard that she met a guy in a bar, and he brutally murdered her.
And I lost two friends on 9/11. They both worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center.
I knew a victim and a murderer. The murderer was a close friend’s younger brother. I wasn’t all that surprised.
The victim was a girl I knew from about middle school and into High School. We had several classes together and later I found out she was a close friend of my High School sweetheart. She had a crush on me and we kissed/made out a few times at parties. One morning about a year ago I woke up to see her picture in the local news. She was strangled by some druggie. Apparently she had been turning tricks, the druggie was a John who went berzerk for some unkown reason.
I felt terrible. She was a nice girl, but the people who she hang out with were trash.
A girl I took ballet lessons with quit ballet so she could focus on drill team. She showed up early for practice one Saturday, and later in the day someone found her body in the bushes behind the high school. The killer had strangled her with her own nylons and jacked off on her stomach. She wasn’t more than 16 or 17.
I once worked for a fine man, Frank Carnevale, who was murdered by his neighbor. It was over a truck that Frank had lent him. No one knows exactly what happened except that Frank eventually took back the truck, and the neighbor repaid his kindness by shooting him to death.
I haven’t directly, but come close a few times. A babysitter that used to babysit our son wasn’t murdered, but her boyfriend was.
A client at a former company was killed in a carjacking, but I never met him. My best friend at the company knew him well, though, and worked on site for him a lot.
Two roommates that lived across the hall from my college girlfriend were killed over fall break - they had been swimming in the James River and were knifed for reasons unknown.
A girl I knew in college pretty well and for a couple years afterward got a call that her sister had been killed by her girlfriend, who then killed herself.
Holy cow, Eva Luna! I came into this thread to post this same story. I was a child at the home daycare run by Eileen. Joe called my parents (and all the other parents) that morning and told them not to bring me in because Eileen was sick. shudder
I went to high school with kids from both the families that took in the boys and the girls.
My freshman year high school English teacher was also a good friend of one of the girls.
My grandfather was murdered when I was a year old, so although I guess I technically knew him, I didn’t really *know *him. It’s something that’s just not ever really discussed in our family, but I’ve picked up a few details and whispers over the years. My grandfather owned and ran a small appliance business, and the guy who killed him owed him money or something. I don’t know if my grandfather was demanding payment or what, but the guy stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors. He was never caught, but I’ve heard insinuations that he was punished. Meaning, my uncle at the time was involved in local politics, had some shady connections, and had at some point told my grandmother that it had been “taken care of.” This all happened over thirty years ago, that uncle is long since gone from the family via divorce, and I’m sure I’ll never know much more than that.
My senior year of high school I dated a guy whose Dad had just murdered his Mom. As in, the murder happened in early August or so, and I started dating this guy in early October. At that point, his Dad was still on the run. He had shot his wife, put her body in the trunk of a car and driven down to Dallas, where he left the car in long-term parking and hopped a flight to the Phillipines. I was with my boyfriend through the whole process of discovering his Mom’s body, his Dad being caught and extradited back to the US, sentencing and imprisonment. It was a rough time for him, needless to say (this was before I recognized and fixed my tendency to date guys who needed “rescuing.”) His Mom had been cheating on his Dad, so he (the son) was very angry with her, and it was painful to watch him try to justify what his Dad had done. In the end, he discovered he couldn’t and that he had lost both his parents through his father’s inability to forgive his mother. Although it was probably not the healthiest relationship I’ve ever been in, to say the least, I’ll never regret that I was there for him through what was probably the hardest year of his life. We broke up as people do when we went away to different colleges. Poor guy–he’s been very successful career-wise, but he’s on his third marriage already, and we’re only in our early thirties. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.
In Vancouver I used to know this guy, he was about 15, gangster wanna be, skinny as fuck. Actually, I didn’t know him that well but his family was involved majorly in the drug trade. I knew some of his brothers and such. Two chicks from his highschool killed him. They are probably out and about seeing as how the Young Offenders Act basically would give them a slap in the hand.
A neighbor, which I didn’t know well, but who got her hair done at my mom’s hair salon was killed in a murder suicide by her husband. I used to see them every other day and sometimes the lady would hitch a ride with us when we went shopping. It was a very weird feeling.