Our neighborhood included a nice assortment of kids ranging from goody-two-shoeses to lowdown mean kids. And yes, I believe the worst of the worst suffered from bad parenting rather than inherent badness. That said, I just googled the name that popped into my mind as the embodiment of “bad kid” in my neighborhood (my age - other grades had their own baddies)
That got me to the New York State Department of Criminal Justice page - he’s currently incarcerated. Six years into a 14 year sentence for aggravated sexual assault.
It just occurred to me to ask a side question: Did any of your high school yearbooks have a “Most Likely To Wind Up In Prison” couple?
Or did the “Class Prophecy” include names of ne’er-do-wells destined for such ignominy?
I do recall a notice for one of the reunions I didn’t attend some years ago that had an addendum for all the folks in my class who were dead for whatever reason. In some cases the reason they were dead was left blank and it was up to you to assume what you would. I assumed most of them were victims of foul play.
The bully in my middle school had a reputation for tormenting other kids and doing sexually devious things…
I now live in his neighborhood. One day I saw a girl (turned out to be his sister) who was developmentally disabled being helped into a van outside of his house, and in that instance it all made sense to me…
There was a kid who was a couple of years older than me who was the reason I quit riding the school bus. He’d often pick one kid at random on the bus and torment the shit out of him. Since he had the reputation of being just a little crazy, you never fought back. He blew his head off with a shotgun his senior year. I never did hear what the precipitating event was.
There was a family of them: 3 boys. (The girl wasn’t much of a problem.)
Causing fights, fires, explosions, thefts, etc.
Their father was a school principal and for a long time couldn’t believe his little angels could do any wrong. Made the minister’s kids look like saints.
They all grew up to be total losers. No college educations, of course, barely employable.
There was a kid in our neighborhood about my younger brother’s age who was a bit “off.” My brother refused to hang out with him because the kid creeped him out (and given the other types my brother has chosen to hang out with on occasion, that’s really saying something). He just seemed to be constantly angry and slightly detached from reality. He got pulled out of the regular high school and sent to an alternative program. Despite that, he managed to get into the Marines right after high school graduation, at least for a little while.
6 months later, he murdered his father in a patch of woods near our house. Stabbed him 30+ times. First he claimed they were attacked by MS-13 gang members or something, then he claimed that subliminal voices on TV told him to do it. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and tried to cop an insanity plea, but the court found that he did know right from wrong when he committed the act, so the defense failed. He’s doing a life sentence now, although he’s currently locked up in a mental hospital.
My brother didn’t seem at all surprised at the news.
Wow! The ‘bad kid’ in my neighborhood wasn’t anywhere near as over-the-top as some examples presented here. If he had been, I do believe my maternal-unit would have chained me up in my room. As it was, Brian was the kid who would get all the other kids to soap people’s windows at Halloween. He would stay home and ‘supervise’. I think he got the idea from his father who was, if I remember correctly, a general contractor. Pretty generic small-town hijinks. No firearms or knives were involved. Smuggled Playboys, check. Tree forts, check. Underaged sexual encounters, maybe but I wasn’t privy to those details.
Dang. I sure was a square little Poindexter, wasn’t I?
I do remember one such little angel. By high school, he was using and dealing drugs. He eventually joined the Hell’s Angels, and began a career of petty crime.
He died at age 38-from the effects of too much booze and drugs.
Justin lived on the next street over, the “bad side” of our itty-bitty city. Freckled and always a bit funny smelling, he was several years older than the kids in my cohort (although not remotely as far ahead in school as that would seem to suggest), but was friendly with Lee, whose house bordered ours to the rear and fronted on Justin’s street. Justin had the customary fascination with violence, weapons and gore, but backed it up with actual weapons, real fights and disturbingly detailed accounts of canine internal anatomy gleaned from patching up or disposing of the members of his family’s pack of assorted mutts after their internal squabbles. Mom banned him from the house and discouraged my me and my siblings from playing with him (not that we relished having contact with the junior psychopath). He wasn’t an issue for long, though, as he had to move away following his father’s imprisonment for having a rather brazenly undisguised backyard marijuana patch.
Yeah there was one in my neighbourhood. He was the local hard lad and bully. I don’t ever recall him bullying me much but I was always a little afraid of him as were most of the younger kids around the estate. I ended up writing a song loosely based on him. In later years he seemed to mellow out a bit but then he’d often try to beg money off me. I gave him a few bucks one time. He died of a heroin overdose at age 32.
The two boys next door we played with were a little strange, but they were about our ages. I remember Mom calling them “squirrely”. Turns out a few years after we moved away they were 14 and 16, went hunting with their dad and came back without him. Apparently they shot him and left him in a shallow grave, a bear dug him up and someone else found him.
There was a kid on my street. He liked to break thingsjust because they were there. He liked to disobey any authority figure that told him not to do something, and break any rule he could get away with.
He died before he was thirty, under mysterious circumstances. Police opined that his death was probably drug related.
He had two cousins, each of whom was the bad kid in their neighborhoods. Both of them died before thirty , of drug overdoses.
One of my good friends from high school married a neighborhood bad boy. I wouldn’t have known he was a bad boy, except that while reminiscing at a reunion, I mentioned an incident when my folks came home from work and found raw chicken innards stuffed in a chair (in the living room). He smiled and said “I know who did that.” I asked him if he had a problem with my parents and he said no, he liked my parents just fine, but kids just do stupid shit sometimes. Joe’s just fine now, couldn’t ask for a nicer guy or a better friend.
Two of my boys were [del]mischief-makers[/del] hellions – sand in a car gas tank, window broken with a slingshot, glue in school door locks, dynamite on the 4th of July – but AFAIK no issues with other kids or small animals. All of this before junior high, and none of it continued. They’re fine now too. I totally believe it when I read that the part of our brain that controls judgment isn’t fully formed until the early 20’s.
It would be easier to define the nice kids where I grew up. The thing is, because they were my friends, I didn’t realize how bad they were until I got older. Some of it was comically bad.
Alas, most of them are currently dead.
The bad kid in our neighborhood was tall and strong for his age, blonde and handsome, yet somehow undeveloped socially. He would suddenly grab and overpower someone half his size out of the blue. I guess it was mostly stuff like that that made him scary and strange. He lived close to me and I visited his apartment on occasion, always intrigued and a bit frightened, the timid bookworm that I was. He was a lousy student yet very interested in RPG’s (table versions back in the mid-80’s), fantasy and movies. Basically a Dolph Lundgren-style hulking, menacing, dashing pre-teen nerd with learning disabilities and whatnot.
Growing up in a city, me and most of my friends didn’t have any inkling about guns, hunting etc., although we watched Knight Rider, Streethawk and McGyver and played with toy guns all the time. Once, visiting Dolph Jr., I noticed a cool toy rifle hanging on the wall. Without thinking further, I grabbed it, pointed it at Dolph’s face (he was sitting next to me) and said something like: “Say your prayers, punk”. Just as I was literally squeezing the trigger, Dolph looked up, grabbed the barrel, frightened, and twisted it away.
Turned out the ‘toy rifle’ was a cocked and loaded airgun. Dolph and his bigger, badder brother would shoot seagulls out the city apartment bedroom window with it. I reckon a point blank shot to the face (eye, neck etc.) would’ve messed Dolph bad, possibly blinding or even killing him. I was a fraction of a second away from messing up my future, as well. As Dolph proceeded to bury the shot into a stack of comic books, I learned a lesson, utterly baffled that someone would have a real killing weapon at ready in his bedroom wall at age ten (he was two years older than me, yet at the same class level).
I have no idea what became of Dolph Jr. Now I’m a bit curious.
He’s been on Death Row since 1990. Note that his first murder was in 1977 - our sophomore year in high school. He murdered a man in the sand dunes behind the Regency Square Mall in Jacksonville FL and then set the car on fire. He was paroled in 1988 and was out about a year when the DR murder occurred. This time, his brother was an accomplice.
He was nasty, mean and vicious when we were growing up. I don’t know how to describe it - he was just “that kid” you always knew just to leave the hell alone.