Well, the owner of my favorite pizza joint back in Queens was, apparently, a bank robber and a killer. I ate there all the time, talked to the guy all the time, and thought he was a nice guy!
My mom went to high school with John Wayne Gacy.
When I was in high school, a girl whose name was VERY similar to mine (same first name and her last name and mine had the same letters in a different order) was frequently mistaken for me and vice versa. We were in the same grade and everything and knew many of the same people. She was murdered by an acquaintance of a mutual friend. Very sad, and very frightening to all of us, but hearing people talk about MY murder was quite freaky.
My landlord at one time was Stuart Alexander. You know, the guy who ran a sausage plant and killed some federal meat inspectors. OK, so I didn’t go to school with him, but I was in high school at the time, does that count?
People rush to judge in cases like this – but has the town been safe?
A guy from my high school in New York City shot and killed a cop. I didn’t know him (the shooter or the cop). The shooter was younger than me – maybe he was a freshman when I was a senior.
The odd thing about it was that my high school was very small and very academically rigourous. One had to pass several tests to qualify for admission, and go through a series of interviews, as did one’s parents. Everyone went to college. Good ones, too. Not the kind of place that one would expect to turn out cop-killers.
A kid I went to elementary school with beat an old man with a tire iron when we were 13 or 14. He knocked him of his bike and beat him (I don’t remember if he died or not). He did it “because he was Korean”.
Seeker74: I’m just glad they found out who did it. I’ve been wondering since she was killed.
My grandmother was a teacher, and one of her students was Joel Rifkin
I too went to High School with a killer. AND he apparently killed a girl (they just pinned him for it this year) in 1996…THAT WAS WHEN WE WERE IN HIGH SCHOOL :eek: I was 16, he 17. When I first saw him on TV I had to call a friend and make her get out the yearbook and confirm it was him.
On the flip side… the family of this girl (this was a widely publicized case in Oklahoma as she was a student of the University of Oklahoma, young, beautiful, etc…) finally has the comfort of knowing that this man is in jail.
Didn’t he go out with Elaine Benes?
Jeez, that creeps ME out, and I never met him OR your mother.
Years ago, I worked at a locked mental health facility catering to young teeners with rich parents.
We had this one kid who was a mess. Priveliged, white, moneyed… thirteen years old… thought he knew it all… and was desperately trying to break into the Hispanic gang scene. Swore up and down “his real father was Hispanic,” despite his extremely Caucasian appearance. Fought his therapist, fought his parents, fought his shrink – none of us knew anything about cool, and he was gonna be a ganger, no matter what.
It was really kind of laughable… the kid didn’t know “Hispanic” from Shinola, really, and physically and psychologically, he was NOT equipped for gang violence, gang life, or a life of crime in general. At all. He was a small-for-his-age, pale-as-milk, overpriveliged white kid who wanted what he wanted.
They yanked him from our center one night after he managed to get out, jump a fence, and attempt to steal a car. After that, he was a police problem. (He was rather upset to find that cutting the colored wires under the dashboard and touching them together won’t start the car engine).
A little over four years later, I ran across his name in the paper. I won’t say the city, or the kid’s name, but it was him – his name was very distinctive. No major city has two people with this name. Plus, his age was right, and the article mentioned his incarceration in various mental hospitals. I’ll call him Joe, for convenience’s sake.
Seems he’d straightened out after a couple months in jail. He’d gone home (under massive probation and supervision), gone back to school, and gotten his act together. He was on the verge of graduation from high school, and his probation was due to terminate on his eighteenth birthday.
A month before that, though, he went out and got a handgun and took it to school to show a few people.
I knew at once why he’d done it. He hadn’t intended to shoot anyone. He wanted to look cool and badass to someone. It was pure “Joe,” that stunt was – cool, badass, and incredibly stupid.
Naturally, one of his classmates ran like hell for the principal. Upon finding out that someone had done so, Joe lammed out of the school building. He was smart enough not to head for home, but dumb enough to head for his best friend’s house. Pure Joe, that one was.
No one was home. Cops arrived while he was in the garage, trying to kick open the kitchen door. He managed to get the garage door shut. The cops surrounded the place, and tried to talk him out.
At that point, Joe realized that he was utterly screwed. They knew his name, they knew he had a gun (bigtime probation violation), and they knew he’d brought it to school (bigtime stupid thing to do)…
…and he’d screwed up enough times in the past that he was quite sure that this time any sane judge would put him away for at least a year, probably more…
…and he’d come to realize that he was nowhere near as badass as he had once thought he was. A year in prison would be hell.
So he blew his brains out, on the spot.
More than once, I have thought about what that kid was like when we had him in treatment, and what we – and I personally – might have done to deflect him from this particular path. To this day, I don’t know. He was among the most stubbornly, stupidly determined-to-screw-up people I have ever met.
Don’t think he learned anything from me. I sure learned a lot from him, though…
A kid who graduated from RUHS in 1968, the year after me, committed suicide years later. This hit me hard, not because I knew and admired his older sister, but because I had an older sister myself who committed suicide one summer–and the following year my Dad really freaked out and tried to kill my Mom. I never saw him again. 