What is the Worst Ending for a Classmate That You're Aware of?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
121

Out of 75 young men in my class of '83 (small Catholic high school in Wisconsin), we’ve already lost five before the age of 50:

  • One from cancer
  • One from a heart attack
  • Two by suicide

However, the fifth one was the “worst ending”. He and his brother were out snowmobiling, each on their own machine. My classmate hit a bump and fell off of his snowmobile; his brother, who was following right behind, accidentally ran over my classmate’s upper leg with his machine.

My classmate stood up, apparently a bit bruised, but none the worse for wear (or so he thought). His snowmobile had hit a tree after he’d fallen off, and was inoperable, so he got on the back of his brother’s snowmobile, and the two of them headed off to the next location on the trail (as this was Wisconsin, said location was a bar).

When they got there, my classmate’s brother discovered that my classmate was unresponsive. It turned out that, when he’d run over my classmate, he’d partially severed my classmate’s femoral artery. My classmate had bled to death, internally, during the ride.

122

Interesting Kenobi. I graduated with 84 others in 1984 from a small high school in a small town in Wisconsin.

So far only two have died. One from a farm accident and one from a brain hemorrhage. I don’t know if that is statistically average or not.

123

A high school friend of mine died of AIDS - that’s about as sad as it gets AFAIK. Of course that was 40 years ago, so we are starting to die anyway.

Regards,
Shodan

124

A guy a year behind me died in college after a bad drug trip–he stabbed himself in the heart I believe.

125

One of my best childhood friends (I lived with his family for a whole summer) got hit by a train driving home drunk from a party shortly after we graduated from high school. He was in a coma for weeks but eventually came out of it and mostly recovered. He had some mild to moderate brain damage from the trauma but still managed to work, get married and have a cute little boy. The recovery was remarkable compared to the initial prognosis. He also won a very large settlement from the railroad over the accident so he didn’t ever have to worry about money. I didn’t agree with the settlement because it was his fault but they apparently neglected some laws about railroad barriers at that crossing that triggered legal liability from them.

That isn’t the sad part though. Everyone was thrilled that he lived and his super-religious family declared it a true a miracle. Things were OK for the next 17 years until one morning about 5 years ago. He was found critically injured and unconscious at home on a Saturday morning. At first, everyone assumed he had some kind of freak accident until the doctors pointed out that he had a skull fracture caused by blunt force trauma as well as a broken back and multiple injuries that could have only been caused by some type of extremely violent struggle. Someone beat him almost, but not quite, to death and then left him that way probably assuming that he was dead.

He is in a persistent vegetative state now that he will never come out of and has been since that day. No one knows what led up to the crime or who did it either. There have been rumors about who did it and why but no real leads or arrests and there probably will never be. It is just a matter of waiting until he truly physically dies in his hospital room. He is basically just a living corpse now. Meanwhile, his family who are some of the sweetest and most generous people that I have ever known have been destroyed by it in all ways and may not survive as long he does clinically speaking.

126

The other really tragic classmate case that I have is still ongoing and I don’t want to write too much about it because a new trial is coming up really soon. A really sweet guy that I grew up with took his kids to school one day in there small Texas town and came home to find his wife dead in bed and his stepson in the garage also dead from a self-inflicted rifle shot to the head area. He called 911, the police came and investigated and they declared it a simple murder suicide resulting from a fight over a cell phone the mother and stepson were having that morning.

That is a horror story on its own but it gets much worse. Many months later, the county prosecutor decided that he really doesn’t like having heinous crimes like that with no one to execute or send to prison for life so he invents this very ridiculous theory that my friend actually did the crime and set the whole thing up to look exactly like a murder suicide.

Despite no evidence whatsoever for that theory and plenty to the contrary, they somehow gather the dumbest jury in Texas history up and score a conviction. He was supposed to be thankful that he got life without parole for a crime he didn’t commit instead of the death penalty but it doesn’t work that way.

Luckily, there are some very underfunded but effective Innocence project organizations out there that can take a very select few cases and they picked his because it is so clear-cut. Despite all odds, he won a number of appeals including some with the highest levels of the Texas justice system and had his original conviction completely overturned and sent back for a new trial. Unfortunately, he is still in jail because they set bail at a prohibitive level pending that trial. The corrupt prosecutors put off his new trial originally scheduled for this past summer until past the upcoming elections but it will be soon once they don’t have to worry about their jobs again for a while (that is the most important thing isn’t it?). His new trial should clear his name for good if there is any logic or justice in this world but it isn’t like the movies even when he does become free. He has still lost almost everything that he once had.

127

A classmate of mine from grade school committed suicide after murdering his wife. He was always troubled growing up, but I didn’t expect that end for him (or his family).

128

There have been a lot of horrific stories in this thread but I think this one is about the saddest. How awful. :frowning:

129

When I was a sophomore we returned from winter break, and I noticed a classmate from my history class was missing. Nobody said a thing but I heard from another classmate that the boy accidentally either shot himself or someone shot him and he was killed. It was so odd cuz the principal didn’t announce it, no funeral services were mentioned and our history teacher said nothing. I wasn’t friends with him and he had his own group, over 15yrs later, my friend and I surmised that it was suicide and that the school was ordered not to announce his passing.

130

Several sad ones:

[ol]
[li]A couple that went together in high school got married and were married for 15 years before he came home one night shot her to death, tried to shoot their kid and then shot himself. Nobody is sure why he did it.[/li][li]Had a friend who dealing in high school and then after he graduated. He disappeared in 1988 and hasn’t been seen since. The last person who supposedly saw him never gave a straight story as to what happened and he was found dead in a motel parking lot in 1996 or 1997.[/li][li]A friend from grade school had a pulmonary embolism at work and died before he got to the hospital. He was 37.[/li][/ol]

131

A kid I was good friends with all the way back to grade school had an interesting early life. I hope he’s OK.

Call him “T”. He came from a solidly middle class family (father a doctor, mother a homemaker). He was very studious and well-behaved, so he seemed mature for his years. But he was odd and quirky too, and didn’t have many friends. A group of us mildly-countercultural types accepted him in our loosely-defined clique. We went on hikes and bike trips. Later, in college, we lifted weights together.

For all his scholarliness, T was prone to bizarre acts that made it seem like he wasn’t really connected to reality. Once, on a bike trip, he got a flat tire. He went across the road to a gas station to get a patch. When he came back, “ready to go”, he had put the patch on… the outside of the tire.

Another time, driving a car, he got a traffic ticket for going through a red light after stopping. T told me that he thought the ticket was unfair. The cop who ticketed him had been coming through the opposing light. In private, T admitted that his light had been red, but demanded, “How did the COP know it was red?” I suggested that if the cop had been facing a green light, T’s light would have to have been red. T thought for a moment and replied, “Yeah, maybe. I never thought of that”.

T had wanted to be a doctor like his father, but after finishing a degree in biology, he was told that he didn’t have the science grades to get into med school.

So he joined the Navy. Went to OCS, spent about three years in, received an honorable discharge as a JG. Came back to town and went to grad school.

I was watching the local TV news one day in 1986 when the announcer said that my friend T had been arrested in a “bizarre series of extortion crimes”. It’s a strange experience hearing someone you’ve known all your life identified by all three names for the first time.

Allegedly, T had for several years been driving hundreds of miles to commit acts that were described as “terrorism” outside the homes of two officers he’d served under in the Navy. He would set small fires outside the houses, and fire guns into the windows. The FBI had lifted his fingerprints from one of many explicitly threatening letters he’d sent the officers.

Apparently, T’s surface appearance of maturity and obedience had gotten him pretty far in life, and these two officers were probably the first people who weren’t taken in. He never had told any of us about these two guys, but my guess is that they were blunt and unsparing in telling him that he was incompetent, which he wasn’t used to. So he formed this weird vendetta mentality against them. He’d hidden it well - I’d been lifting weights with him several times a week right up until his arrest, and never noticed anything unusual about him. Well, nothing more unusual than, usual.

Everybody who knew T was stunned by the allegations, and were at first not unanimous in believing them. A few weeks after his arrest, my mother was reading an article in the paper that quoted one of the threatening letters: “Have your life insurance paid up. Hint hint”. Mom started crying and said, “Oh my God, it’s true!” For someone who’d known T since he was ten years old, there was no mistaking his bumbling style, even when he was making death threats.

At his trial, a shrink described him as “immature, self-centered and absorbed in a fantasy world”.

The trial took place in the town where the officers lived, which was a huge Navy town, and they really threw the book at T. The officers (a captain and an admiral) had moved into on-base housing in response to the acts and threats. This was the early to mid-1980s, so there was speculation that Libyan elements might have been behind it all. T was found guilty and did time in state prison, and after that, did additional time in federal prison for crossing state lines to commit the crimes (and I guess for sending threatening letters through the mail). The total was about ten years.

I wrote to T all through prison, but have since drifted out of touch with him. I hope he’s OK.

132

A friend of my brother collapsed suddenly at the age of 18, a few months after he had graduated from high school. He never woke up, and within a couple of days he was dead from a brain tumour.

133

In my case, it was four. 1/2 of one came back, both legs blown off.

134

I had one high school classmate who was murdered by her boyfriend. Both of them were drug addicts; I heard not long ago that he was released from prison. He had served about 25 years.

Another classmate, who I had never heard of until he died (we were from a class of over 500) died mysteriously, and a movie was made about the case. It airs periodically on Lifetime Movie Network. I did know his sister, who was a year older.

Yet another classmate, who was a massively talented musician, died in 2012 in a boating accident. His brother was later arrested for vehicular homicide, because he had a BAC of something like 0.17 when he was tested.

And I had a college classmate who died about 10 years ago as a result of ODing on stolen drugs. :frowning: He was a pharmacist, and looking back on it, I’m pretty sure he pursued that profession to have access to those drugs.

135

Went to a small (400 or so) high school and I was one of a group of 7 guys that where the go to guys when things went wrong. No major crime but if your gas tank went from full to empty in your driveway over night or some of your chickens came up missing or you wanted a bag of dope or hit of acid, we where the sorce. Around graduation I did an assessment of where I was heading in life and made an exit of that toxic environment. Ten years later a chance meeting with the sister of one of them revealed that of the other six there were two in prison one on parole and one shot dead during the commission of an armed robbery of a liquor store.
To this day I look back at that July day in 1974 that I got in my '64 Chevy Impala SS and pointed towards the Pacific Ocean as the best day of my life.

136

One of my classmates was shot dead by a policeman while peacefully protesting Apartheid.

137

At least 5 people I graduated high school with (10 years ago) succumbed to heroin. Many of the classmates who did die from heroin did leave behind small children.

My classmate/neighbor was killed crossing the street going to school. Her dad, my sister, and many of the students crossing witnessed it.

138

Not precisely on topic, but related -

In college, some friends asked me to help out in a dive shop run by one of their friends who was in jail.

At some point, they asked who my SCUBA instructor was. When I answered, everything got real quiet.

The dive shop owner was in jail for killing my SCUBA teacher. :eek:

139

Here’s my actual on-topic tale.

Act 1: In high school, I had a female friend I usually sat with. One day I noticed her breath smelled peculiar - like nail polish remover. Having a diabetic and a nurse in the family, I recognized possible causes which included extreme diabetes. I ultimately rationalized that anyone THAT diabetic would have collapsed, and said nothing. Other less urgent causes were “filed” to ask about later.

Act 2: A short time later, I asked her out. Vehicles at my disposal were an ex-postal three wheeler that overheated if driven at highway speeds, my parents’ van, and my motorcycle. The van had a bed in the back, and I felt that it projected the wrong message for a first date. Therefore, I took the cycle. It was Fall, in a damp climate, leading to wet leaves being prevalent.

Act 3: The directions she was giving me to the party took us down some back streets, on one turn of which the cycle skidded and dumped us (according to the police report - I have no memory of it, having been concussed.) She was uninjured, but the shock initiated a diabetic collapse. Turns out she WAS “that diabetic” and didn’t know it. Kidney failure, followed by heart failure, followed by death.

Not a happy memory for me. :frowning: Especially when the first “domino” fell through my rejecting an “illogical” conclusion.

140

One of my classmates lost an arm in some kind of farm machine accident. Which sucks for his arm but at least he is still with us.