A classmate about 10 years ago stopped to help a lady change a tire on the expressway. Another car veered and hit him. He died instantly.
Another one, I just found out last year, died of alcohol poisoning about five years ago. She would’ve been 34 at the time.
I’m 54, so I would have guessed that by now, I’d have lost some old HS friends and acquaintances, but so far I haven’t. That said, when I was in H.S., a student did drink himself to death in the woods behind the school. He died of alcohol poisoning. I probably was a freshman at the time, and there was talk that he had been suffering from depression.
Not in High School, but in College, when I was a Sophomore during what we used to call ‘rotation’, some freshman died of a heart attack. Apparently, he had some kind of genetic disorder, and his parents knew that he was ill, so they didn’t blame the school. (Rotation, btw, was the system that they had where for 7 days, each freshman would visit a different student house at a social gathering, and after visiting each house, they’d select which of three houses they’d prefer living in – kind of like ‘rush week’, except we didn’t have fraternities).
Don’t know anyone yet who’s died. I’m 42.
I do know a lady who is losing her mind, though.
I went to high school with one of the four students shot at Kent State in 1970.
My sole college roommate my freshman and sophomore years of college wasn’t the greatest person in the world but we got along well enough to live together voluntarily in a very small dorm room for two solid years. We lived together, went out together and knew each other’s families very well. We started to have lots of disagreements towards the end of our sophomore year and decided to find new places to live after that which was probably the healthiest thing for anyone anyway. I saw him around campus a lot and we were always cordial to each other. He went to law school like he always wanted, became a corporate lawyer, got married and had a child.
A few years ago, I wondered why he wasn’t on any social media whatsoever because most people were at that point. It only took a 10 second Google search to find out why. Brittany Maynard certainly wasn’t the first or only one to use physician assisted suicide to kill themselves at a young age because of a terminal brain tumor. My ex-roommate did that too in his early 30’s. It gets worse though. Some of the things that I read implied but didn’t outright say that his mother, who I also knew well, also killed herself over it after he died because he was her only child.
A guy I went to college with, who was a friend of a friend. Generally a nice guy,but hated doctors generally, and he had a special weird conspiracy theory that people had evolved under the sun, and there was no such thing about too much sun, that the doctors were lying. He would get hyper-agitated and freakish whenever anyone would bring it up, which was pretty damn often because he intentionally got sunburned a lot. Then when I graduated I lost track totally. I heard he had later married a girl I he had met through me. Anyway, about three months after the wedding he went to the hospital, sick as hell. The doctor found he had several distinct skin cancers, and was far beyond hope, and he died 2 weeks later at 21.
Well, I’ve got two (I graduated in 1995):
A former friend who was murdered when I was a senior in high school (1994). We had not really talked much in the past year. He was jumped by a couple of other kids who beat him to death with The Club.
The second is a classmate with whom I was not particularly close, though we had corresponded briefly through email a couple of years prior to the incident. Apparently, she had stayed in a hotel near LAX in 2003 before a flight and was murdered by what was assumed to be a serial killer. An article I found says the following:
My middle school coach was that step fathers brother. I was in 8th at the time and that’s all we talked about.
I just heard a story today that reminded me of this thread.
About two years ago, a classmate and acquaintance of mine disappeared rather suddenly. He was a coke dealer, and apparently he had pissed off some of the wrong people. It was widely believed that he had skipped town suddenly, though no one exactly knew for sure.
I just heard the story today that he had actually been murdered. Some guy had been bragging in a local bar how he not only killed him, but buried him deep in the woods two feet underneath a dead animal, so that any search team using dogs would only find the animal and they wouldn’t keep digging to find the person underneath.
The confession was overheard and reported, which lead to the guy being arrested. The story I heard, which I’m not sure I believe, is that he claimed he was joking, and they couldn’t prove otherwise. No body or any other evidence was ever found.
I have a college friend with whom I lost contact a few years later who also doesn’t appear to be on any social media, nor does she seem to have any online presence. She may, however, have some very good reasons for doing this.
When I was in my early 20s, I met a very interesting man through a club we were both in, and even asked him for a date (he turned me down). He was in medical school at the time, and I couldn’t find him online either, which was puzzling because you’d think a physician would have SOME online presence. I Googled him again more recently, and found out that he had died in the early 1990s at the age of 31. He was a practicing physician in another state at the time of his death, and was apparently single (he’s on findagrave.com and his gravestone says, "Dr. (his name), followed by the dates and “Beloved Son”) but I could find no further details about his death.
And while we’re on the subject of brain tumors, a girl who was on the periphery of my own social circle met her end that way in the late 1990s. A woman who was closer to her than I was messaged me on Facebook a while back asking about her, and she hadn’t known and was quite surprised to find out.
Three school friends were killed in a car crash whilst in their senior year - I was a grade younger so I can’t say I was close even though I knew them.
A few years later when I was working we had a guy started working with us. He had a quite a few scars and some murky secret that was kept in a locked safe and only the bosses were aware of it. I was a bograt so had no idea. He only lasted about a year and then one of the bosses told me he had been drunk driving a car that had killed three young people in the suburb where the accident happened. Same guy.
It was rather strange but so long ago now.
Not dead, but horrible event nonetheless: A friend of mine who’d always been a little off and with a short fuse went to prision after getting into a sword fight with his uncle and ended up killing his grandmother who tried to stop him. The uncle died a few days later of wounds suffered in the attack.
A girl I casually dated in HS was an apparant homicide victim a few years later. She was active duty Air Force and was killed in New Mexico. Beyond that, and a date of death, I have no further facts. I wish I did. She was a wonderful person.
In grade school a friends brother went swimming at the plunge in a local hotel.The water was so cloudy the lifeguard never saw his body in the bottom of the pool. I remember not knowing what to say to my friend, so I said the only thing I could think of.“I’m so sorry”, turns out that really is all you can say at a time like that.
The worst that happened when I was in high school involved two sisters and their boyfriends. They decided to park in the woods in a very rural area and then walk to some nearby natural gas storage tanks and sit on top of them one Saturday night. That sounds incredibly stupid but those types of storage tanks were all over the place where I grew up and they were usually just partially filled with water and usually harmless. I have done the same thing myself many times because they seem like a good place to sit peacefully, watch the stars or make out.
However, they have potential to be devastatingly dangerous if they are filled with natural gas and you are a smoker like a couple of them were. The explosion could literally be heard and seen for miles. The fire department was immediately dispatched but the tank and everything around it was obliterated. Everyone assumed it was caused by a freak lightening strike at first. It wasn’t until the next morning when the 4 missing persons reports trickled in along with a report of a vehicle found on a side road near the tank that anyone put it all together. A careful search of the area turned up enough body pieces to make identifications but not enough to justify traditional caskets. They were simply completely blown up and likely went from alive and feeling to absolutely nothing in a few milliseconds.
I knew all of them quite well since early childhood because it was a very small school. There families never recovered from it at all and three of the four parents had an early death themselves.
Similarly in mine (class size ~60). A year ahead of me (my brother’s class) had one guy with Hodgkin’s that seemed to be responding, but then he died of a brain tumor their senior year. My best friend (a year behind me) died a couple of years out of high school, and then so did one of my classmates. My brother had Hodgkin’s in his 20s too but survived. I’m very sorry about your brother.
On a lighter note, my bully from HS became a local politician in my hometown. That may be a fate worse than death.
Well, that’s exactly where I was going to go. Coming to a gruesome end isn’t that uncommon where I come from. I have a bunch of those stories.
A friend I had, late grade school/high school, smart, funny, I ran into him some forty years later, and his mind was completely gone, due to the effects of religion. He’d gotten mixed up with religion at some point, and it became his idée fixe. I found it incredibly sad.
You can’t blame religion for something like that. He had another, separate mental breakdown or psychotic break of some kind.
I was walking down the beach here in Puerto Plata with my best male friend on the island of the Dominican Republic. He was born about 91 days before myself, so not a kid. We’d come to where a small river flows into the ocean. He usually preferred to walk thru the river , but my preference has always been to cross the bridge. it is 25 or 28 steps thru the river and it is a bit over knee deep. “Let’s do the bridge.” he said “I feel tired.” As we crossed the bridge 3 young bikini clad girls accosted us. “Hi babies.” We were greeted. I showed them I wear a wedding ring and was told as I have been before “We aren’t wanting to marry anyone, just have a few hours of fun.”
Across the bridge Richard said he was tired so we sat on a log. One girl, Richard, another girl, myself, and one more girl. We conversed about the recent rain etc. I turned and asked him if he was ready to go. I noticed his lips were blue, not just a hint, but blue. He said “I won’t be going anywhere.” and after a pause he said “Ever.” and he leaned forward and died. The girl between us started to scream and the one on the other side of him grabbed his face and tried to kiss him, the one on my right got up and ran and called the police from her cell phone. An ambulance arrove and he was gone. I had met his daughter previously and gave her email address to the police. I’ve never before witnessed death, but have become aware of the fact that my time is not too far in the future.
No this wasn’t a classmate of mine, but a good friend. He would have been 69 years old just before Christmas this year.
I’ve known (knew?) him since we were in kindergarten; his younger brother is the same age as my brother. My brother and I are adopted - he and his brother are adopted as well. His mother taught Sunday school with my mother.
He was always…off. Always.
UT~