The gal I walked down the aisle with during the high school graduation ceremony was shot and killed by a boy friend about 10 years after we graduated. He also shot 2 of her 3 children, they survived. He wimped out and hung himself while commited to a mental hospital a few months later.
Could have been leptospirosis from rat piss.
A guy I didn’t know too well in high school was one of the jock crowd, but I don’t recall him ever doing any jock stuff to any of us “lesser” people. He was big beefy weightlifter type dude.
By chance I saw some recent pics of him on Facebook (he must have been about 40) and he was fighting some kind of disease related to alcoholism. He utterly unrecognizable. Even knowing it was him, I could see no resemblance at all. Then I think it was a few short weeks later he succumbed to the disease.
It’s scary shit, damn nearly killed a friend of mine from high school. He was the fittest, most active guy you knew, a triathlete, mid 30s, used to go on adventure kayaking trips all over the world, like white water in Brazil, you name it. And he tipped a canoe in some quiet little backwater river in England practicing with some new gear, and a week later he was in Intensive Care with practically every organ on the verge of shutting down.
If he got what he wanted, is it a “good” end or a “bad” one.
My best friend in HS came from a family who taught him that “dying for your Country” was the best possible thing a man could do.
He got his “best thing” 7 months after graduation by being point man on night recon in heavily VC area.
A Vietnamese had the better idea: “Make other slob die for HIS country”.
He didn’t even get a granite slab - just a bronze disk in what I’m guessing was the local “pauper’s field”
Bruce Randall (“Randy”) Harris, died Jan 1968. PFC, USMC.
For those who question such a person existed.
Stories like these still bring tears to my eyes. Vietnam changed a generation, for sure. I am sorry your dear friend died for such a pointless reason.
Not my story, but a friend of mine once found out that her high school crush was sent to prison for repeatedly molesting children in his late teens and early twenties. Maybe not his ending, but I have a feeling it might dominate a large portion of his story.
I’m not aware of any deaths or anything. However, there was one freaky occurrence. A year or two after graduation, I saw what I thought was my classmate’s obituary in the newspaper…apparently he died in a car crash. Something wasn’t quite right about the obituary, though. It said he was a 1996 graduate of my high school, not 1995. It turns out that the victim was another guy with the same name who was a year behind us.
I wouldn’t doubt it. I grew up in a suburb of Washington DC, close enough that I ended up visiting the Vietnam Memorial at least once a year, usually at least twice, every year after it was dedicated. I probably walked by your friend’s name ten times.
RIP Randy.
Joe Wagner. I played soccer with him for something like eight years on various intramural teams, and graduated high school with him. Two years after graduation, he was working at a lumber yard, and the forklift he was driving fell on top of him, killing him instantly. I was in the service at the time, and couldn’t break away to go to his funeral, but I heard that it was very sad.
Another tragic sad story is Chuckie Wilkes. He was a “Hood” that worked on Stage Crew. He kept to himself, but got into fights often. His family was himself, his mother and father, and his sister. During school, both his mother and sister committed suicide. During our senior year, he cleaned himself up, cut his hair, and started dressing better. He barely graduated with us, but he graduated nonetheless.
I found out that about six months after graduation, he himself committed suicide, leaving his father alone, with no family.
Can you explain what this means? By “hood” I guess you mean hoodlum, but what is “Stage Crew”?
I would assume he means the standard definition - the people who work behind (and above) the stage during plays and concerts - building and moving the sets, handling props, flying scenes, etc.
Two of my classmates were the kind of item that you don’t believe if you haven’t met a pair like that for real. If we’d been American they would have been the homecoming king and queen every year between, oh, K2 and 12th, never mind that the royals are supposed to be seniors. Both cute, both nice, both intelligent, both good students, and totally in love with each other starting when we were too young to send “do you like me? Y/N” notes. If it had been anybody else it would have been saccharine, but with those two, it was just… the way things were. It was like the sky just before the sun breaks out from behind the mountains: too pretty to be real, but it happens every day.
Her parents divorced when we were in 7th grade; she spent two years away, then came back in 10th grade. It took them about three seconds to see that yes, they were still heads over heels over each other; the rest of us had seen it faster.
In Spain you can drive a motorcycle below 50cc, with a license, from age 14. Being from one of the most prominent families in town, and one which lived “away from town” (there was about half a km between his house and the edge of town), Chus had one of those bikes. One day, his sister had forgotten her gym stuff, so during mid-morning break Chus took her home to get it. He only had one helmet, which he gave to his passenger as was the custom.
There was a long S curve between the school and the house. They’re not bad curves at all: just a touch on the steering wheel, good visibility. But the truck driver who was coming the other way didn’t bother with that touch on the wheel.
Chus, dead on the spot. His sister has been in a wheelchair since and depressed, still blames herself thirty years later. Marisa was shattered. As a secondary consequence, she also discovered that her “friends” were the kind who’s good only for sunny weather; she was crying quietly and the idiots kept telling her “oh, don’t cry!” until those of us who generally speaking have the manners of mule train drivers barged in saying “damnit, of course she’s crying! She just lost the love of her life! Shut the hell up!”, took her home and set up shifts to be with her for the couple of days she skipped school (not in the room unless she wanted us there, just available in case she needed anything).
Actually, I have ambiguous feelings - sometimes it’s “Rot in Hell - you Bastard! You left behind a sweet young woman who loved you!”
Can’t even remember her name - just the look on her face when Randy was in sight.
This! Well, only one of them killed themselves, but the other one tried to and is now in a state hospital. He seemed like a normal guy, but ended up losing it when his father was killed by a drunk driver. That has to be rough. My friend overdosed on cocaine after getting expelled for drinking at school. We weren’t best friends, but it still messed me up for a while.
I would say “you should have known better”, but then again most of the blame rests with the family, and the overall phenomenon of nationalism in any case.
Anyway, here’s my offering:
I knew this guy from 6th grade to 12th (we were the largest graduating class in the country that year, which was the year 2000). He and I were never friends exactly, but we had numerous classes together and almost always got along well. He ended up serving as Class President during our junior and senior years (11th and 12th grade). You know how a lot of people who are those go-getter, striver types are awfully insincere, phony, seeking to pad resumes, and actually quite vapid, if intelligent? Well, he wasn’t like that at all. He was the real thing. Affable, good-natured, genuinely funny, and genuine.
I will always remember him at graduation, announcing over the stadium’s PA that he was going to do an interpretive dance on the stage, though I’m not sure to what extent he actually performed; that was probably just for a few seconds.
He had made a few comments over the years about his “crazy” mom, and I knew there had been some family turmoil related to that, but I never knew him to have any personal problems. After graduation, he went to college, and later went to law school, and then I was utterly shocked to find out, quite by chance, that last year he had succumbed to mental illness and taken his own life, leaving behind a wife and infant son. Apparently he had been struggling with some form of adult-onset mental illness for years, and as I was searching around online for an obituary or something, I saw some arrest records and mug shots, indicating that he had, in his final year, gotten arrested twice for seeking out underage pornography. It doesn’t damn his memory, as he didn’t directly harm anyone, and he was basically out of his mind anyway.
Poor guy. I’m surprised that I never talked with him since graduation, and I wish that I had.
My oldest brother went to school with serial-killer Joel Rifkin. But that’s my brother and Rifkin is still alive.
My friend Steven was alone at his wood-working shop. He sliced into his arm/hand on the table saw. Bled out. He was (not at all unusually) pretty high on cocaine. That supposedly contributed to his demise.
FWIW, It looks like he’s got a regular military grave marker, in the same cemetery as his parents: Bruce Randall Harris
Not a classmate of mine, but the son of long-time friends of my parents: He got into an argument over money owed to him from the sale of drugs and ended up shooting and killing the two other men. He fled, but later that day I guess he realized that there wasn’t any getting out of the situation and shot himself. He was 19.
High school boyfriend committed suicide before he turned 30. I’d split up with him twice (once at school, once first year of Uni) fairly badly both times, and still hope whatever damage I did him didn’t contribute to his state of mind.
My folks grave is marked like this, certainly not a ‘pauper’s field’.