6 of my fellow graduates went to Viet Nam. None of them came back.
A Deaf classmate of my sister tried to break into a nightclub after hours to rob it. Unbeknownst to him, it was undergoing renovations and was closed down. He got stuck in the HVAC system and eventually died there. His remains weren’t discoverd for many months.
Clearly he had issues, but it was still tragic to imagine him there, unable to hear anyone to know when to call for her (he wasn’t mute).
A guy I knew in junior high school recently died of ALS.
My dad has me beat, though… a classmate of his is rather infamous.
Oh, lord have mercy, how could I have forgotten this similar and terribly tragic thing?
My brothers went to Columbia High School with Mark David Chapman.
These are all such sad stories, little slices of life and death.
Found a memorial online for a 2nd grade friend who I knew through HS. She died in her early 30’s.
Guy friend in HS, super popular kid, football player, typical jock type, graduated top of the class, became paranoid schizophrenic. In his early 20’s he started telling people the FBI was after him, implanted something in his head, tapping his calls, etc. The family moved so I don’t know what ever happened to him. Very sad. Hope meds eventually helped him.
Not from school, but I found 3 different mugshots online of a former boyfriend of 2 years in my late teens. One arrest was for purse snatching, not sure the other two. Wow, pathetic. He looks like a junkie too. Progressively worse in each photo. I’m so thankful that I chose the right fork in that road! I knew he was a bad boy, but not that bad.
Ron Miller, a guy who sat in front of me in homeroom, died about six years after graduation a month after entering a Toughman boxing competition from head injuries sustained in the fight.
High school classmate I didn’t know well. His father, who IIRC was having problems with his mother, turned into a family annihilator one Christmas. Him, mom, brother, then suicide.
Went to middle school with a kid who died after heading a soccer ball. First real encounter with death. The rest have just been common or garden car accidents.
One of my ex-classmates from School left to join the Navy aged 17 in 1981.
He was killed about a year later during the Falklands War whilst serving on HMS Coventry, when it was bombed and sunk in the South Atlantic on 25 May 1982.
He was the first guy of my own age that I knew to have died.
While we were still in high school, one classmate died in a house fire. Her picture is edged in black in the yearbook.
A boy who was in my class for the first 8 years of school (and whose mother went to school with my mother) got mixed up in drugs in high school and wound up dead on the side of the road about 1500 miles away from home. They never knew for sure how he died.
I heard this story second-hand since I’d left the state already, but a guy I knew slightly in high school supposedly got high one time a year or so after graduation and decided he’d climb a power pole to watch the sunrise. He electrocuted himself at the top.
Um…this thread is going to be nothing but the Cavalcade of Exotic and Horrible Deaths™ unless we get someone who never went to school with anyone who died, or thinks there is some fate worse than death (both possible, I suppose).
The head girl at my school in my second year, the daughter of one of the teachers and a lovely girl (my only real interaction directly with her was when I tripped over carrying a big pile of books in my first week, she was the girl who stopped and helped when everyine else was sniggering, but she was friends with a girl in my class, whose dad also worked at the school) died just after finishing her exams.
She’d been dumped by her boyfriend, was convinced she’d failed everything, and went out and got very drunk (legal here at 18, which she was). I don’t know exactly what happened, but she showed up dead the next day, and the verdict was suicide.
She’d passed everything with straight As.
My brother’s class went out after the leavers’ ball (our graduation party equivalent), as was traditional, but after my bro’d left, a bunch of guys climbed up onto the roof of the nightclub they’d been thrown out of, and one fell off. He wound up with severe brain damage, though he is still alive, sort of.
guy I went to grade school with died of a heart attack a year after graduating high school.
Past that I don’t know, I haven’t kept up with anyone I went to school with.
A guy I went to high school with killed himself about a year after graduation because his parents couldn’t handle him being gay. Two other members of my class committed suicide when we were in 10th grade. One was caught doing drugs by his mother, the other was presumably depression. A couple of others were shot to death, and at least one was beaten to death.
I’ll be the exception to the death parade then.
Disclaimer: I don’t remember or keep up with my high-school or college classmates, and at least in high school, it is very likely that some of them came to bad ends in gang or drug related stupidity.
That said, the worse fate I know of is for a classmate who was a really smart, really sweet guy who was brought over illegally by his mother when he was an infant. (His father was a citizen, I believe, but the father died overseas.) His mother was deported while he was in high school, and there was a long and twisty social/legal battle to let him stay long enough to graduate. He graduated, thought that he was now ok to stay while paperwork was being worked out to make him legal, and was admitted to a really good university. As soon as he got moved in to the dorms, something went south and he was picked up and forcibly deported. His younger half-siblings (born in the states) were ‘allowed’ to stay, bereft of their mother and barely older brother. It just sucked all around.
I never found out if he got back or not, and I always think of how stupid it was to deport someone who has lived here their whole life, and who wanted to be (and has the brains and drive to be) a scientist. Just a pointless waste.
I’m not aware of any of my HS or college pals or acquaintances who are anything other than hale & hardy today. Then again I have no contact with any of those folks. All thousand-plus of them could be dead 20 years for all I know.
A lad I shared one class with in primary school and was friends with for a couple of years around ages 7/8/9 died of an overdose when he was about 18. I used to see him emerging from the bushes near our houses, high as a kite.
One of my best friends in school died a day or two after his 17th birthday, brain tumours galore. He had never kissed a girl (or boy for that matter), never drank, never smoked, had done precious little and he was also one of the funniest, smartest, oddest people I’ve yet met.
Local hard chaw, sorta bullied me when we were very young but then we got on well enough, I didn’t think he was into drugs, asked me for a “loan” maybe 3 years ago. I gave him $5 or whatever I had on me. I met him again a few months later and he tried to tap me again, told him I didn’t have a penny. Found out the next day he wound up dead that evening of an overdose. He was 30, maybe 32.
One of my sister’s best friends, Fiona, from school and college, a mutual friend of theirs died of cancer aged 40 recently. My sister knew that Fiona now lived in the US so went a-googling to try contacting her. She hadn’t talked to her in maybe 5 years.
She found out that Fiona had gone to Washington State (I think, definitely PNW) to join some new age cult. She had some sort of guru there. Anyway, a few years ago she was in a two-car accident and the occupant of the other car was killed. She was also severely injured but recovered somewhat, albeit with horrendous scarring. She didn’t have health insurance and was unable to work and was also suffering trauma from having been involved in someone’s death so she was basically destitute. Sometime at the start of last year she climbed into the bath, shot her dog, then herself.
I attended college & then worked for a few months with a girl who died in an airplane accident. She was instructing a student on a night flight when the airplane flew directly into a flock of geese. The impact folded up the tail, causing the airplane to violently pitch up and roll upside down before entering an unrecoverable inverted spin. It was found a few days later, inverted and barely sticking out of a marsh. Both occupants were still in their belts.
One second you’re cruising along, fat, dumb, and happy, and the next second you’re being violently tossed around in the pitch black and hopelessly disoriented. They likely didn’t even see the water coming up to meet them. Imagine driving your car across the Golden Gate Bridge at night, chatting with your friends, maybe you’ve got some tunes on, when out of nowhere you’re t-boned by an out-of-control dump truck and blasted over the rail - that’s about what it would have been like, just with a 20-times longer fall.
There’s no way they could have possibly seen the geese in time to do anything at all; it was a total freak accident. Sometimes your number is just up.
I’ve told this story before, but it’s a bit different this time because I recently connected with some folks from back in the day who corrected some faulty memories of mine.
When I was in high school I was bullied and tormented mercilessly by the jocks and the “in crowd” kids, but there was one member of the gang, named Karl. Karl was a star football player, who looked like a model and had a flashing smile, great body and hair, and was the dream date of most of the other girls in the school. He was also in the gifted program with me, and was a star academic performer - while the other high school football players were struggling with basic algebra, Karl was making an A in calculus. Karl was also the nicest, sweetest boy, who not only never said or did an unkind thing to me, but he stopped a couple of bullying incidents against me, very strongly telling people to leave me alone and show me respect. He was kind to animals, and raised some small animals as pets, and worked at an animal shelter part-time. I think he wanted to become a veterinarian, but the memory fades.
Although Karl’s family had some money, he worked hard and got a full scholarship to University via a combination of athletics AND academics. Nonetheless, he had a serious work ethic, and while other kids were laying around smoking dope and drinking and partying that last summer vacation before college, he was working full-time with a moving company to earn extra money, so he wouldn’t have to take out any loans for school.
Mid-summer he was helping move a family one day, and about lunch time everyone got their food and camped out in the garage of the house they were moving stuff into for a break. Karl took his lunch - still made by his mom - and sat back against a clothes dryer which had been moved into the garage space and plugged in. According to witnesses, he twitched once, then seemed to fall asleep. For reasons unknown, no one thought that was unusual. When lunch was nearly over, someone came over to wake him up, and received the shock of their life when they touched his arm.
Somehow, some way, the dryer had been damaged during movement, and had become electrified with 220V current. The speculation was that Karl leaned back against it with his sweat-soaked shirt, and the current took a path through his body, stopping his heart.
He was a great kid, a true scholar-athlete who was kind and generous and a looker to boot, who had perhaps a stunning life ahead of him. And it all was lost by a stupid, senseless, accident which no one could have predicted. His funeral was attended by pretty much the entire school who were still in town, and it was a major psychological blow to many of us. It was sort of an “end of the charmed time,” when mortality seems so far away and death is something that happens to people on TV or your 80 year-old grandparents. Many people were deeply impacted by it, even myself who only peripherally knew him.
I know of ONE grade school classmate who became a drug addict and died of AIDS in the late 80s.
TWO of my high school classmates died within a week of each other at the age of 25. They both died in car crashes on opposite sides of the globe.
And about two years ago, a high school classmate of mine committed suicide after losing his editorial job, during a wave of layoffs at his publishing house.