Here’s one from my past who, perhaps unfortunately, narrowly escaped a de facto or literal end.
In sixth grade, the elementary schools came together into the larger middle schools, and I met Robert, who would be in school with me for the next six years. He soon attracted attention and repulsion, for he was disgusting. If he had simply been obese that would have been one thing, but he was also unhygienic (dandruff flying everywhere, among other things), malodorous, obnoxious, and generally bad news. We had exactly one class together, in eighth grade, and I remember one day when he was pantomiming shooting everybody (complete with saliva-spewing sound effects) with a pump-action shotgun as they entered the room. We actually had a few interests in common, which was almost enough to make me abandon such interests (and did plant some seeds of doubt in my mind), e.g. I remember telling him why I thought 'mechs, a la Battletech, would never be practical. He also had kidney stones at one time, for whatever that’s worth.
I don’t quite remember him disappearing from school suddenly at the end of 10th grade, though perhaps the semester had already ended. I do remember the beginning of 11th grade, when I was at school with my mother, picking up my schedule and other things. I saw Robert enter the cafeteria, trailing his father, who seemed miserable and disgusted. I noticed how clean-cut he was, and I remarked on this to my mother. She told me to stay away from him, and then she explained why.
It seems that he had committed an aggravated sexual assault on his five-year-old sister. My mother added that his mother was dead and his father wanted as little to do with him as possible, which seems to explain the one time I saw him get dropped off at school without the driver even pulling into the parking lot; the car slowed in the right lane of the nearby busy suburban artery, he opened the door and stumbled out, shut the door, and the car peeled out. Needless to say, I stayed away, and in fact I don’t remember much else directly involving him during the next two school years. I do remember running into him after graduation; at the end of 2000 I saw him and a large group of pals unknown to me at an IHOP late one night, they had apparently just seen Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I don’t think he saw me. In the following year he was working at the community college where I spent some time, we had one conversation about some administrative matter, in which we pretended not to recognize one another.
Some years after that, it occurred to me to check the online sex offender database, and sure enough, there he was. I found out that he was arrested in a county a considerable distance from home, which makes me wonder if he had committed the crime during a vacation, or if he had fled to the coast afterwards, or something else. Sometimes he was living in a hotel, at other times he was homeless, but then his record disappeared. See, he was sixteen at the time he was arrested and his case ajudicated. He was a minor, which meant that his sentence of probation and registration ended around 2010. Anyone who knows his full name can search online and find his preserved arrest and registration records, but does anyone in his life today who ought to know, know about his past? He went to a different community college, and is involved in game design. He has a Facebook page with no familiar names among the friends.
It makes me wonder what other dark secrets are held by people I know these days. I also wonder how he would have fared had he gone to prison, or even a substantial sentence in juvenile justice. Despite being 6 foot 3 and 350 pounds, something tells me this hideous sex offender who lived in a world of fantasy would not last long among gang bangers and such. It would be a dungeon crawl come to life, with real edged weapons, but no magic spells.
