A friend from high school was killed a few years after graduation while rock-climbing above our local river. I read about it one morning at work in the newspaper. He was such a nice guy and had been in several of my classes.
There was a guy I grew up with by the name of Howard Koslosky. After high school he ended up in the Navy. I found out many years later that he went to Vietnam. At one point, he caught a hop on a Navy plane, headed to his assignment on an aircraft carrier. Not far from the ship, it disappeared off the radar. Neither it nor any of the crew/passengers was ever found. His name appears on the Wall in WDC. An unpopular kid throughout childhood, he finally found notoriety in the worst way possible.
A classmate of mine died in an accident at a steel fabrication mill. He was a crane operator, and he neglected to clear the crane’s chains from the I-beam he had just set down on the top of a pile of I-beams. He manuevered the crane away from the load, the hooks on the ends of the chains caught the I-beam, and it toppled onto him.
The year after high school I became a crane operator in a different steel mill (weird coincidence), and I realized that it was laziness that killed him. Lots of crane operators would unhook the chains from the load, and leave them to dangle near the load as the crane was moving away. The correct proceedure was to hook the ends of the chains back onto the crane, making a loop and ensuring that the chains were nowhere near the load.
The teen in question had bullied me in my social studies class repeatedly before he died, and I had very weird feelings when the entire football team mourned, and his parents came to speak to the school about the teen’s memory living on, etc. I kept my mouth shut, but wanted to introduce myself to his righteous parents as his punching bag. Far be it from me to wish death on a teen boy, but I’ll tell you I didn’t miss him.
Would this incident have taken place in Southern Ontario in about 1993-1995? I carpooled with a person who had just gotten out of jail after spending 10 years in for committing a similar crime (baseball bats and everything). The drug was acid, the amount of money was apparently pretty moderate, and the ex-con was living in the Niagara region after release.
He told me that he was a ex-con after we had been car pooling for a while, and he seemed normal enough. Spoilers: I didn’t get murdered.
One, that I know of, is doing life. Two, who were classmates going all the way back to kindergarten and Catholic elementary school, died due to alcoholism and drug abuse when we were still in our 30’s. Some, beginning immediately after graduation, fell to automobile accidents. Now that we’re into our 50’s they are starting to fall more quickly to heart attacks, cancer, and other medical problems.
A classmate ahead of me (junior when I was a freshman, I think, or maybe one year on from that) hit and killed a kid on a bike while on the way to school. He was completely exonerated - was sober, driving safely, everything, and the kid literally rode out in front of him. However, I saw a little and heard more later that he was completely destroyed by the incident. I wasn’t in his circle so I have no idea what might have happened to him later - but I bet it never went away.
That year, our yearbook had a picture of a student on a bike, through a windshield. It went to print with some bland, silly caption. I have heard the original caption was the tasteless and vicious, “Kosinski right on target.”
Not a classmate, but a girl I’d known since teenagehood vanished in 2007 and her dismembered remains were found months later at 3 sites on opposite sides of the city.
One of our HS rabble rousers didn’t even make it to 20. He was riding in the bed of a pick up truck when his head collided with a somewhat low concrete parking garage. He had a cool late 60s mustang with personalized California license plates that said “EAT ME”. RIP Hans.
When I was in elementary school, the vacant lot next to our neighborhood was being turned into another housing development. We kids used to go over to the construction site when no one was there and horse around.
One of my classmates was climbing on a pile of concrete slabs there (I think they were going to be part of the sewage system) when one of them fell and crushed him.
Was he molested by the pastor he killed? His personality and crime make me think sex abuse. If so, the death penalty was harsh.
The worst that I know of for me is someone in my grade dying of natural causes in her 30s. Scary. Others before and after me have died but that was due to accidents or rare diseases.
One of the nicest guys I knew apparently fell asleep at the wheel and crossed the centerline into the path of a semi truck only a couple of years after graduation.
I found out the boy that sat next to me for 6 years in band died of either bad drugs or an overdose when I asked his sister about him a few years ago.
Finally, a professor rather than classmate, fell about 1100 feet off of the north summit of Mt Whitney. While everyone was shocked and saddened by his death, no one who had classes under him was surprised by how it happened. ‘Conventional’ just wasn’t in his vocabulary.
I went to a very small high school of less than 500 people for all four grades. We had an unusually high rate of auto accident deaths, I think. But there were some pretty wild things happen to my classmates.
For starters some guys got drunk, I think it was in 11th grade, and broke into a power station. One guy climbed up on some equipment and touched a transformer maybe? Whatever it was electrocuted him, burned him all over and blew holes in his feet. He didn’t die though. He had a lengthy recovery and when he finally returned to school he had to wear a special suit with long sleeves and a hood to help his skin heal from all the burns.
Then there was the girl who was shot in the head. This happened about 3-4 years after graduation. She was living with another classmate I’'ll call “M” when she was murdered. M’s cousin and his girlfriend were also living there and I think the final verdict was that the cousin had shot her but was never convicted for whatever reason.
Finally there was the huge football jock who, several years out of school, was arrested for abducting, raping and murdering a 12 year old girl. He was executed for that. I always found him to be creepy and avoided him in school.
I can add another one to the not a gory death pile.
A kid who I went to middle and high school with used to get picked on relentlessly for being the heaviest kid in class.
10 years after graduating he was arrested at a local elementary school. He was trying to lure kids into his truck using drugs, cigarettes and money to give him oral sex. While being interviewed by the police they determined he had no idea that what he was doing was wrong.
His crime details were from a newspaper article. I have no idea what happened to him after that.
A forgotten story - Mrs. B., while waiting for the bus with some other middle-school students, witnessed one of them shoot himself in the stomach with a gun he had just found. He bled out dead before EMS could arrive.
Three classmates from high school, including my brother, died in their 20’s from various types of cancer.
I’veposted before about a classmate from University who died after being left unattended while he was having a bad LSD trip. He jumped from the 7th floor window of his dorm room. His father, a journalist, wrote a heart wrenching tribute which was published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and has been republished several times since.
A girl I knew was murdered at age 19 for being in the wrong place at a wrong time. She was visiting a friend who dealt weed on the side. His competition came in to clean house (shot everyone there point-blank in the head).
I had a new best friend in fourth grade. We sat next to each other in class and even had identical dresses. She had four brothers and sisters. Her mother apparently had mental problems because one night when the dad wasn’t at home, she strangled all of the kids and then killed herself. That’s a tough thing for a fourth grader to grasp. This was about 45 years ago and it still breaks my heart to think of it.
From grad school: One guy was a spelunker. He was climbing an underground waterfall, fell backwards, got his foot caught and hung upside down in the waterfall. By the time others got to him it was too late.
Mine is similar. He graduated a year ahead of me, but I knew him. He was honor roll, on the debate team, went to Boys State and got elected to office. We expected him to become a lawyer or politician. He got arrested for a robbery in California, while there confessed to a double murder in Texas during another robbery. While on death row in Texas, he stabbed another inmate through the temple with a sharpened bolt in view of a security camera and danced joyfully around his victims dead body. He was executed, or “texecuted” as some anti DP website put it, in 2002.
One of my best friends through much of Jr high and high school ended up being a heavy duty drug trafficker (like cargo containers of pot) was caught at 27 (1997), and via a combination of charges related to his business (some of them violent), has been sentenced to about 90 years in prison.