I took a couple of days off work, so I’m lounging in bed, listening to the news on the radio, and there’s a report about three bodies found, an aunt, an uncle, and a niece.
How awful, I think, as I stumble to the kitchen for coffee.
I surf the Dope, then decide to check my work e-mail. There is an e-mail from our CEO. The report about the three bodies…the niece was my co-worker.
Has this ever happened to anyone else? I’m stunned, I’m shocked. I don’t quite know what to do. I called my boss, and she said she was just getting ready to call me to tell me about it. I was not in the co-worker’s department, but our departments worked together closely.
When I was a kid working in a Burger King after school one of my fellow co-workers did not show up for work one day. Later that night there was a huge story about a few bodies being found in an abandoned house that were killed execution style. The early rumors were that it had to do with drugs.
The next day when I went into work I noticed the co-worker had not shown up again. When I inquired about her I found out she was one of the bodies that was found in the news story the previous night. The cops had found a paycheck stub on her person and traced it back to the BK we worked at. The cops had been in there earlier that day questioning the manager and employees about her. They had nothing to tell as it was all a big surprise to us. She didn’t seem like the type to be caught up in something like that.
I saw that this morning and wondered who the people were. Too close to home! The closest I ever came was a friend from junior high who’s dad killed his mom and a bunch of his siblings and then turned the gun on himself. Very shocking. I always felt terrible for this really nice guy. He left town I guess with relatives not long after.
ivylass, I’m so sorry for the news and the way you learned it. When one of my two bosses was murdered, it was a horrible shock. I learned about her death via a call from my other supervisor while we were both on Christmas break. She and her husband were killed, but their three children survived. Despite the fact she was an attorney working at a legal publishing company, they died intestate. Due to religious differences (one side of the family was Catholic; the other, Jewish) there was a huge custody battle over the children, with lots of office visits by people looking any sort of documents in lieu of a will that would prove their case.
Don’t know what to say as to how to handle it. Each of us on the project team handled it in our own way, I guess, and somehow we all muddled through. I would love to offer platitudes about how to brought the survivors closer together, or how we all learned something by it, but in good conscience, I can’t. Their deaths were the act of a greedy careless person, made no sense at all, and served to bring some people together, and drive others further apart.
I’m sorry you have to face this scenario, and wish you and your co-workers all the best in coping with this tragedy. Feel free to p.m. me if I can be of any assistance at all.
During my tenure at my previous job, two of my co-workers were killed (different times, different places). One I did not work closely with, but the other one I did, and it took a long time for it to sink in that I would never, ever see him walking in our shop door again. He was a very nice person who unfortunately put too much trust into the wrong person.
There’s Revtim’s cannibal thread and I recall reading something posted by some Doper about a former co-worker of theirs who turned out to be a murderer.
My neighbor was murdered in his basement execution-style by his son. I didn’t know them that well since they became my neighbors only a year before I went off to college. But I do remember not liking the son because he tried to scam me into mowing his part of the lawn between our houses. That’s a big deal in the 'burbs. I also remember my mom telling me stories about the trouble the parents were having with the boy. At one point they sent the kid to live with relatives in Taiwan (They’re immigrants) because he pulled a knife on the Dad. It was still quite a shock to read the story in the news. Apparently the boy and a friend wanted some money for drugs and dad wouldn’t cough it up. So they put the gun to his head while he was kneeling. So my mom ended up with a neighbor with no husband, no oldest boy (No big loss there), and a two-year-old who will never really remember his father. She probably did alright financially though since she had a large extended family throughout the area that had good mutual-support ethics.
I imagine she’d rather just have her husband back.
I’ve had a couple of co-workers over the years who died for various reasons. Car wrecks, heart-attacks, cancer. The sudden ones always bring you up short, even if you’re not close. It’s just weird to know they won’t be around anymore.
I’ve also had one co-worker be arrested for dealing drugs, which totally floored us all! That was definitely weird.
Just yesterday in fact. I didn’t know the woman personally, but I recognized her when she would come into the cafe in the library(I’m the baker) in Topeka, Kansas.
She didn’t show up for an appointment and a friend went looking for her. Police found her body at her home, and her 5-yr old daughter was missing. Chief suspect was the husband. They put out an Amber Alert for the child, and they were spotted in western Nebraska. Word came late last night that they had been found in Albany county Wyoming. The father killed himself, but his little girl is ok.
One co-worker and drinking buddy nearly girlfriend.
The co-worker was someone I worked fairly close with, she was in QA I worked in Engineering and worked on the same projects and had gone out for drinks with mutual work friends. She was found behind a restaurant next to the dumpster. I still can’t go by there and that was almost 20 years ago.
The nearly girlfriend, she was 19 I was 24 and recently divorced. we kind of drifted apart. A about a year later She was beaten to death in her sleep by her roommates friend, who then freaked out and cut her up and tried to get rid of the body parts. If I had only had the balls to commit to her…
I did quite a bit of babysitting when I was in high school; mostly for one family but I also had a couple of families that I would sit for occasionally. One of the occasional families had three children: a 7 yo girl, a 5 yo boy (w/asthma) and a 3 yo girl. Since I wasn’t their “regular” sitter, they naturally put me to the test! Anyway, while I was chasing the 5 yo down (he was running around outside w/o a coat, in 40 degree weather), the 3 yo, who was with the 7 yo in the finished basement playroom, had climbed on top of the mantle of one of those fake fireplaces they had back in the 60s. As I was coming back inside, I hear this loud thump and then all sorts of hollaring, and sure enough, the 3 yo had fallen off this mantle thing. It wasn’t very high, but it sure scared the crap out of me! She got a nice sized lump on her head right away, so I called my Mom and told her what had happened and asked her what I should do; she advised me to apply a cold compress, which I did. The swelling was going down when the mother came back home (which was within 15 minutes of the injury happening). The mother went BALLISTIC, hollaring at me that I should have called the fire department and taken the baby to the hospital - which I probably should have done, although I don’t know if the fire department would have been able to do that since I wasn’t the parent; at any rate, the child could have had a concussion. The mother did pay me, but -never- called me to sit for them ever again. Oh well, the kids had always run wild on me and made me chase them all over creation, so I wasn’t too upset about it.
Fast forward about 10-12 years … the youngest girl is now about 15; the parents divorced sometime in the interim, and the mother was living somewhere halfway across the county (Oklahoma or Kansas, I think) - sharing a house with a couple of other women. The youngest daughter was visiting her mother during spring break, I think, when the ex-boyfriend of one of the roommates came around. There was some sort of confrontation, and somehow this girl got in the middle and was either shot or stabbed to death. My mother sent me the clipping of it from the local paper (cause the Dad, who had gotten custody of the kids, was still living locally to where my Mom was ), and I was completely shocked! Poor kid…and then I told my Mom, “This is the girl who fell off the mantle that time, the one that the mother yelled at me for not taking her to the hospital…” Very strange; she didn’t have a concussion then but it ultimately was her fate to die in a violent and unusual way, unfortunately.
