-
Rick Stevens was an older kid with bad skin who lived over on American Street who used to pick on all us littler kids, crashing his stingray bike into ours, or chasing us down if we were on foot. One fall he was raking leaves into a pile in the gutter that was already burning, and an older kid driving a car, much like Rick would have become if he’d lived a few more years, thought it would be fun to whip through the burning pile. Rick was partially obscured by the smoke and the older kid’s state of mind completed his invisibility.
-
There was a retarded paperboy in the next town who disappeared along his route one winter. The newspaper ran his photo on the front page, but there was no clues. Later some friends of my older brother were looking for places to party out in the country and broke into a cabin at a camp that was closed for the season and found his naked body hanging from the rafters
Jason had been my first boyfriend, back when I was 13. We had broken up, but had stayed friends - he was a year ahead of me in school.
The summer between his sophomore and junior years of HS, his parents had promised to take him to Hawaii for his birthday. He wanted to go snorkeling, so he was practicing holding his breath underwater in an unsupervised swimming pool, and drowned. It was 4 days before his 16th birthday.
How about some follow up on these stories. Whay happened to the kid that killed the first kid?Was the second story a suicide or a homicide? If it was the allter, were any arrests made?
Craig was three years younger than me, and was really more my brother’s friend than mine. He was a smart kid, and a pretty good guitar player – it was almost certainly thanks to him that my brother got into guitar, and in retrospect I think that did my brother a world of good. He ended up being accepted to the University of Waterloo for Math or Computer Science or something, but before going he decided to take a gap year with his band. I’m not sure if he thought they had a chance of actually getting anywhere or if he wanted a year of fun before university, but either way I guess he made the right choice. Not six months after he graduated high school he collapsed on stage. Inoperable brain tumour: he never woke again. 18 years old and then he was just gone.
Larry and Wayne were drag racing at night on a two-lane country blacktop. Wayne saw the train but Larry didn’t, and he was killed. When the police went to the house to notify his parents that Larry and his little brother were dead, they said no, the little brother was upstairs in bed. Little brother had sneaked out.
About a year later, Wayne was hunting with his best friend Pete. He tripped climbing over a fence. His gun went off and killed Pete.
Hope was one of a large family and slept in a bed with two sisters. One morning they woke up to find Hope dead of a brain hemorrhage. She was 16.
Three sisters (forever known as “the Thompson girls”) who lived on a farm sneaked out one night in dad’s car. They had stopped on a gravel road. Their car was struck by another car and all three were killed. Nobody knows why they were on that road, or why they were parked. Or if they did know, nobody told us kids. It’s still a huge mystery to me, why none of the adults would talk about it.
Rashad was a kid in my year who I knew only by sight. One winter when we were both sophomores, he and his 12-year-old sister were home alone and Rashad was on the phone. His sister wanted to use the phone and he wouldn’t give it to her. So she stabbed him with a steak knife. He died.
Then there was a kid named David who knew my brother in elementary and middle school. He seemed OK to me but my brother said (after the fact) that it had been apparent to him and his classmates that there was something not quite right about David. They were on a youth soccer team together, and we sometimes saw his dad there. Right after high school graduation, David developed full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. He lured his father into a patch of woods near our house, stabbed him 30 times, and left the corpse in the bushes. Despite the fact that he said the voices in his head told him to do it, the insanity defense was rejected and he was recently sentenced to life in prison. So I guess he’s as good as dead.
Lorna was a pretty, bright, and popular student in my high school class. Shortly after graduation, a group of kids, Lorna included, were having a party to celebrate finishing high school. Lorna accepted a ride home from somebody who had had far too much to drink. The driver ran the car into a tree; Lorna was killed instantly.
Thomas accidentally hanged himself in his family’s barn. 3rd grade.
We had a Homecoming Queen who died in a car accident in which alcohol was involved. It was right straight out of the death songs.
And an eight-year-old in my class died from leukemia.
Other than that there were no deaths of children in that small town of 350 people for the eighteen years I lived there.
That has changed. In the last ten years there have been four suicides, two deaths by illness and several deaths by automobile that I know of.
Tommy was distraught over his girlfriend breaking up with him, so he went out to the outdoor stage at a local college and blew his brains out.
Jason was murdered in a mugging in Pensacola our senior year in high school.
Danny and his twin brother(forgot his name) were attending my friend John’s 6th birthday party. Danny was epileptic.
Anyway, at some point during the party, Danny had a major seizure…while swimming in the pool. In the midst of the chaos, no one noticed it was happening and he drowned. They eventually noticed and terror struck everyone.
I just remember the chaos.
My friend Tasha was killed at the corner when I was on my way to work at Meijer. I actually saw the accident, thought(sarcastically) “Yeesh…someone better have died for me to be this late…” and found out the next day my friend actually had died there. 
It was disturbing.
We had defunct railroad tracks behind my across the street friend’s house. The track went across a viaduct over a busy street. Bike trails had been worn out as kids would ride down the side of the tracks and then coast down the hill as the tracks came to the viaduct and end up on the sidewalk next to the busy street.
One day, one of the older kids missed the path and crashed onto the sidewalk and died from a head injury.
My best friend from the age of 4 to 8 died of an inoperable brain tumor in second grade. That was hard on me, but I think it was harder on my parents trying to figure out how to get me through it. I found out years later they asked for advice from a psychologist on how to tell me, etc.
Kid in my high school class, football player, very nice, very popular, was working on his family’s farm one weekend, fell off a tractor and before it could be stopped it had rolled over him and crushed him.
Her naked body was found by ramblers. She was murdered by her step father. She used to get on the school bus at a hamlet, just three houses on a corner. I had mentioned to one of the teachers a few weeks earlier that things didn’t seem to be going okay for her and was told she was on the “at risk” list. Sigh. She was 14.
Russell slammed his car into a brick wall on New Years Eve, he had some incurable disease, he was 18.
Tony and Burle were identical twins. I met them both in seventh grade, but always knew Tony better than Burle. Our junior year, Burle got expelled for the rest of the year for making insensitive comments in the aftermath of the Columbine Shootings. I wasn’t in the class where he made the inflammatory comments, but it was the talk of the school for the next few months.
Approximately one year later, about two months before we would have graduated, he was working at a gas station about a mile from my home when the place was robbed. It was late at night, and he was working the late shift to try to save money for college. I think I remember that the robber got away with about sixty dollars, and had shot Burle in the head three times.
Ten years after that (about a month ago), I was writing an email at work when I overheard some colleagues discussing their children. A woman I’d seen around my office for two or three years but I don’t think I’d ever actually talked to was talking about her twin boys, one of which had a very unusual name. After a couple questions, I realized she was their mother.
The weird thing is, I work in a city twenty miles from where we all went to school and my office employs hundreds. Small world.
Two brothers (ages something like 16 & 18) who lived about a mile from me were on a canoe trip in remote Canada. The canoe capsized and they swam to an island. The older one, who was a better swimmer, decided to head downstream to a town; the younger agreed to stay behind (he had some food & shelter).
Rescuers were back three days later. They found the island but no evidence of the brother, nor any clues as to what had become of him.
My Junior year in highschool, Morgan, a kid a year ahead of me, was at a party and took some club drug that caused an allergic reaction. He passed out, and no one realized that he had stopped breathing until it was too late. The thing that turns it from tragedy to farce is he’d taken the exact same drug a month before, and had the exact same reaction, except someone had realized something was wrong sooner, and got the paramedics there in time.
Denny was a classmate in the 7th grade. The class was divided into two parts to take a nature walk to a nearby park. As the second half of the class was walking past another classmate’s (Jeff’s) house, Jeff’s dog bolted to the road and grabbed Denny by the throat. Everyone swore that none of the kids were taunting the dog but who knows. Unfortunately, Jeff was ostracized by classmates after that. Gotta love Junior High.
Chad (who wasn’t a close friend, but I had known since age 8) killed himself with a shotgun on his parents’ front lawn the summer after we graduated high school.
Sometimes it’s startling how differently things seem when viewed through the lens of time.
I went to school in East Vancouver, in what is still considered to be one of the roughest schools in the district. Even by the local standard, Louie was a wild kid, and seemingly always in trouble. He met his end on his (newish at the time) BMX-style bike, “hitching” a ride on the side of a tractor trailer. Louie went under its wheels.
To be frank, it didn’t touch me much at the time. After all, he was a “bad kid.” (I don’t mind admitting that I was a little fearful of him.) It didn’t seem like a tremendous loss to me, back then.
Now that I’m adult (and a parent,) when his death is called to mind I feel it a lot more keenly than I did at the time. He would have been twelve. He was just a little guy, too. It seems stupid to get choked up and cry about that now, doesn’t it?