In an old thread from 2005 about Murdered Celebrities quite a few names came up that were at least startling if not hard to believe.
Not counting celebrity types (unless they’re kin to you), who among people you’ve been close to have been murdered?
The closest I can think of was a coworker/friend who (along with his wife) was murdered by one of his sons.
A childhood friend of my brother’s was murdered at least ten years ago after a long series of crimes and such. I hesitate to refer to him as “close” to me.
Some schoolmates I barely knew were murdered in high school or soon thereafter.
A rough estimate count of murdered people I knew well enough to be counted as “close” – at one time or other – would be less that 20 and probably fewer than that.
I’m not asking for names or details, just generalities of people in your own life who were victims of murder. Not car wrecks or other tragedies. Murder.
No one close to me, but quite a few of my colleagues have been killed. I’m a foreign aid worker and I have worked with two people who were killed in fairly well known terrorist attacks, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. When I worked in Iraq in 2006, my project lost about one Iraqi national staff member a month to violence. It so happened that none of them were people I knew well, but one of my jobs was to write our monthly reports, which usually had at least one obituary of a colleague that I had to write.
People never believe me but I know an unusual amount of murder victims (probably more than 10 at this point. I am trying to count them in my head but I am sure I am missing a few). It is an artifact of growing up in a very small area with a very high violent crime rate. I also know a lot of murderers.
The one that affected me the most was one of the sweetest old ladies that I had ever met. She worked for my father’s family when my father and aunt were little doing housekeeping and nanny type things. I knew her when she was much older. She used to walk two miles to the supermarket where I worked several times a week and then back home because she never drove. She was in her late 70’s at that point. A young man broke into her home to rob her for drug money one night. She didn’t have much but but he took it and then stabbed her to death. I was quite upset over that and hope he enjoys his life sentence.
One relative murdered out of about 50 that would be that close or closer. One coworker that was a murderer (or framed by his girlfriend) out of somewhere between 50 and 100 coworkers that would be that “close” or closer. And a handful of deaths at a rather early age due to disease/accidents in a class of 50 to 100 “friends/aquantances”.
My cousin was killed by a drug dealer. The dealer was convicted of murder, but I consider Larry partially culpable in his own death, since he had already bought drugs from the same dealer before and drove off without paying. It was a fairly famous case in Tennessee, since the dealer was 12 years old and they tried and convicted him as an adult.
My great-aunt. She was with a friend trying to help the friend escape from an abusive husband, and the husband shot and killed them both and then himself.
No one I would regard as particularly close. But I have known a number of victims.
A woman who I dated a couple of times was murdered several years later, long after I had lost touch with her, probably by her ex-husband.
Besides her, I’ve known three or four others. A workman at the place I work was killed in a mugging. The owner of a hotel that I stayed at in Puerto Rico was killed in a hold-up. A kid who guided me in Africa was later stoned to death by other villagers who were jealous of the money he made from tourists.
I went to high school with a fire captain who died in the WTC on 9/11.
My next door neighbor went to jail for second degree murder for participating in the fatal beating of a neighborhood drug dealer, but I didn’t know the victim.
My brothers and sisters know quite a few victims, because they lived in our neighborhood in the Bronx longer than I did.
Two co-workers were in a relationship that broke up. He shot her and then shot himself.
Another co-worker was possibly a murder victim. It was officially ruled a suicide but many of us that knew him think he was actually killed by his stepson and that his wife (the stepson’s mother) and the stepson made it look like a suicide.
My cousin was murdered a couple of years ago. Coincidentally this was also by his stepson and a friend of the stepson. They also tried to conceal their crime (by making it look like a robbery) but they were arrested almost immediately.
No-one, fortunately. The murder rate in the Netherlands is one-fifth of that in the US, and even then our murders are mostly heavy criminals-on-criminals, with very few civilian or domestic murders.
I, thankfully have not experienced the murder of anyone close to me, but the subject made me remember Frank, who posted on SDMB about his sister’s murder. Is he still posting here? I hope he is alright, and the crime has been solved.
The OP specifically excluded people killed in car wrecks. If we start including people killed by drunk drivers, then we need to start over. Even in the US, a lot more people get killed in car accidents than murdered.
A friend of ours and fellow EOD tech was killed in Afghanistan in an act of war last May 26; does that count? It feels like it counts. The people who built and set up the IED meant to kill.
