Boy, she was a naughty girl! She let her knickers down!
In high school I started working an after-school job with a guy in my class who was Mr. Popularity. I was just the opposite: a shy, geeky nerd. But we got friendly, and because of him I started getting invited to the cool kids parties and came out of my shell a little bit.
Several years ago another friend from high school said hey, remember [name redacted]? Check out this article online in the local news. There was a domestic incident with a gun reported, the cops were called, and when they told him to come out of the house he walked out onto the front porch brandishing the gun. Don’t know if he was attempting “suicide by cop” but fortunately they managed to convince him to put his gun down and arrest him.
I hope he’s managed to get his life together since, because I always thought he was a good guy, and helped me climb up a rung or two from the bottom of the social ladder in my Junior and Senior years of HS.
Classmate sweethearts. Married a few years after graduation. Very romantic. They sort of faded away after that, as happens.
Then we got an update: he had suffered some sort of break, locking both of them in the house because he was paranoid about her faithfulness, and after a couple of days he murdered her.
Just awful.
I had a good friend from fifth grade though high school but who was starting to go off the deep end at the end. He would occasionally argue that Hitler had some good points and not everything the Nazis did was bad. He had a couple of short term girlfriends in school, but they quickly dropped him because of the bad vibes.
We stopped being friends sometime in our senior year. Later I found out that a couple of years after, he dropped of school and followed his ex-girlfriend to Atlanta from Salt Lake City. She got a restraining order and he “fell off the roof of his apartment.”
Not me, but my dad. Sirhan Sirhan was in some of his classes in junior high school.
Not as on-topic or as interesting, but I had a student disappear mid-semester. I gave him an “Incomplete” (so he’d have to finish all his work over the summer).
But then another teacher sent me his mugshot. He was doing time for armed robbery.
Ten years later, there he was, back taking classes and joking just like his old self, like nothing happened.
Another woman I grew up with, who was almost always the smartest person in the room, had me nearly falling out of my chair when I saw her Facebook page. If she ever sends me a friend request, I may reciprocate, but I could not reach out to her once I saw it. In short, I’m pretty sure she and her husband are Sovereign Citizens; they belong to some fringe religious and political sect where (among other things) they conduct business only in cash, do not believe in banks or insurance, and homeschooled their children so they would not be exposed to people with ideas that differed from theirs. They live a few blocks from my parents, in a home her wealthy parents purchased outright and sold to them on contract.
A guy that I went to high school with was arrested last year on child porn charges.
I also have a family friend who is on Death Row in Kentucky. He was involved in an argument with another person (I don’t recall if it was with his girlfriend or someone outside of their relationship) (while under the influence of some type of illegal substances) when someone called the cops. As the officer arrived, Vince rushed him, took the officer’s pistol and shot him in the face, killing him instantly.
Vince was sentenced to death in 1998, and I haven’t heard of a date for his execution yet, but I would imagine that it can’t be more than a few more years down the road.
A somewhat sad story.
In high school, I had a classmate whom I will call Katie (not her real name). Katie was easily the most beautiful girl in school, mainly because she was a professional model, and learned how to carry herself and to look good and fashionable from experts. I’d see her in subway advertisements for a department store chain and in the department store’s catalogues. She was confident, self-assured, and always smiling and happy. She introduced the “Annie Hall” look to our school, which should give you an idea of how long ago we were in school.
Most of us high school guys knew we had absolutely no chance with her, and rumour had it that she was dating a guy in university. She also sat behind me in high school English, and she didn’t “get” English lit at all. At least, not the way our English teacher taught it. I did, however–I was acing the class, and Katie was having trouble. So one day, very quietly in the hall between classes, she caught up to me and asked me to tutor her in English.
Make no mistake, Katie was quite intelligent, in the sciences. It was arts courses that she had trouble with, and while she could manage history and geography and French, it was English that gave her the most trouble, especially with this teacher. I agreed, and we met, once or twice a week, and discussed whatever literary work we were studying, and what the teacher was likely to look for on tests and quizzes on the work. Happily, with my help, Katie passed the course.
In the process, I got to know Katie. There was a lot more to her than she let on. The “boyfriend in university” was a myth, and she liked nothing better than to get home at the end of the day, strip off the makeup and the pretty clothes, get into sweats and a T-shirt, and after homework, make popcorn and watch silly sitcoms on TV. There was more, but you get the idea.
The end of the school year came, we wrote our English exam, and I passed. More importantly, so did Katie. Graduation came and went, and everybody went their separate ways. I did encounter Katie, maybe five years later, and ironically, in the subway. I asked her why I wasn’t seeing her any more in subway ads for the department store, and it turned out that the department store offered her a job as a buyer, which was steadier and paid more than modeling. She loved the job. It was a happy meeting, but brief, as we each had commitments, and neither of us could take time for coffee. She got off the subway at her station, and that was the last time I ever spoke with Katie.
Let’s go forward some 35 years. It’s a high school reunion, and it’s great to see a lot of old friends, and catch up. There was also an “In Memoriam” board, and I was sad to see some of my old friends on the board. Conversations with others revealed what had happened–Paula passed away from cancer, as did Jeff, and Lorna died in a car accident. But Katie’s photo was on the board too. What happened to her?
Turned out that Katie had, some years prior, got herself a midtown Toronto hotel room, in which she blew her brains out.
Nobody knew why. Katie left no note, no indication of why, and nobody could speculate on why. I still wonder why.
A different sad story about acquired mental deficiency, not craziness.
That’s him. His stepmother was my mother’s best friend.
That’s a heartbreaking story, @Spoons
It reminds me a little of the Stephen King short story “The Last Rung on the Ladder”
I didn’t know this woman, but one of my friends did.
While we were in pharmacy school, a woman a couple years ahead of us, who was married and had a small child, was in a horrible car accident a few months after she graduated. My friend told me that after she was stabilized in the hospital and had rehab, she had to go to a nursing home because she was in a state that is now called locked-in syndrome, where she knew what was going on around her but had very limited communication and motor skills. She died several years later.
I later found out that after about a year in the nursing home, she was able to come home to her child and her husband, who took care of her with the aid of visiting nurses, and about a year after that, she did return to Walmart, where she had previously worked as a pharmacist, but this time did per diem work in the shipping and receiving department.
There’s a notorious case of an honor student who was left in a locked-in syndrome by an incompetent doctor in our area; she nearly bled out after an otherwise routine appendectomy, and in short, the doctor lost his license and her family won a huge malpractice settlement, probably more than enough to provide for her care. Her parents have told reporters that they know that their daughter can remember what she was like before, and doesn’t understand why she can’t do those things now, even though she can’t directly tell them. (Some people with locked-in syndrome can use a letter board; this woman can’t.)
12, 13 years ago I once worked briefly with a woman who was probably in her 40s, who was temping for a project with us for a few months. I didn’t work closely with her, but I noticed that she was super quiet. I’m not sure I ever heard her speak. Eventually the contract for whatever state’s testing was over and she didn’t return.
The next time I saw her was a few months later, on the front of the local paper. She’d been arrested for abuse of her preteen daughter that was so egregious that the paper delicately declined to offer any details about what she’d done to the child 
Dude I used to work with, for a short time. He was very smart, and always a pretty weird, even by the standards of computer geeks, who usually include a few weirdos. He would get very angry very quickly about a few topics, one in particular.
He was from India, and hated, hated, hated, Pakistan It was the type of office with a chill out room that had a TV usually on news or sports or something. And whenever something was said about Pakistan he would absolutely flip out and rant in several languages in the same sentence. He spoke fluent Hindi, English, French-Canadian, and Portuguese at least, but made very little since in any of them according to people who knew the languages. A couple times he did in in front of Company VPs and was dragged to private meetings with HR.
Other than that he was a nice guy. 
One time he didn’t show up for work for two weeks, and people were asking about him. He was fairly paranoid and all of his emergency contact info was fake, unsurprisingly. Then one day the Feds showed up and demanded to see his office. The dude I talked was FBI, and other workers said they got ask questions by CIA folks.
The company was completely falling apart at that point and in a unrelated matter, I got let go 2 weeks later along with 75% of the company. It wasn’t till three years later I ran into one of the VPs in a bar I got more of the story.
One day heading home from work he got into a fight at a gas station over who was there first or something. Anyway, the guy called him a “Paki” and he lost it. He grabbed a golf club and beat the dude into a coma, then went the stations smashed everything, including the storefront windows.
When the cops showed he was apparently spraying gas around and holding a lighter.
He was, of course, arrested, and wouldn’t ranting about saying how he was gonna nuke that town as soon as he and his friends finished nuking Karachi. They searched his home computer and whatever was on there was credible enough for a full investigation, so they seized his work computer as well.
The VP didn’t know what had happened much after that, but the last he had heard was that they were still deciding on weather he was a real threat, or a major Mental health case but would be confined somewhere for a very long time.
My first job out of school was at a mail-order pharmacy, and we had a few per diems who worked there when we got extra-busy. There was one guy who was a really strange cookie, and he was sent packing when he told another pharmacist that he was going to sign onto the computer under other people’s passwords (which were not exactly protected at the time; this was ca. 1995) and deliberately make mistakes. Nope, nope, nope.
One of the technicians said that his first encounter with Mr. Weirdo was when he was reading a newspaper in the break room, and Mr. Weirdo took the paper out of his hands and said, “I need change for a 10, and if you don’t have it, you can’t read this paper.” (um, what?) This guy said that he actually did have change for a 10, but Mr. Weirdo wasn’t going to get any of it because he acted the way he did.
I heard later that he was temping at a grocery store here in town, and when he’d worked there in the past, they had a small microwave that belonged to another pharmacist who had since quit, and when she left, she took the microwave with her. When he saw that the microwave was missing, he went postal to the point where the technicians had to call the police, and he was fired and banned from the store. Google revealed that he now lives in another state, and is married (!!!).
Wow! I’m surprised a story that drastic didn’t get into the news and you found out about it in the way you did!
I did search back after the fact and found the gas station part in the news, but had missed it at the time. Never found anything about the rest though.
I did a hunt for what happened to my CAF friend. She was ruled incompetent to stand trial for stalking et al. and was committed instead. You gotta be pretty messed up for that outcome.