There was a kid in junior high whose name I don’t remember who was always sickly, and in a wheelchair, and I never talked to because I was in junior high and not emotionally mature and he was weird. He died of whatever illness he had that I was too self-involved to ever find out about.
Rob was a really popular kid in tenth grade who went partying with some older (11th and 12th grade) kids at Great Falls. He drank some beer, fell in the river, and was swept down the rapids. Some strange immature part of me didn’t quite accept that he was dead since they didn’t find the body, and nobody said the words, “he’s dead.” But of course he was.
When I was in the sixth grade, a girl from our class started hanging out with/dating a high-school boy. Then she pretty much vanished for a while. Next time I heard about her, she was dead.
The boy, a self-proclaimed Satanist, confessed to murdering her. Her body was found buried up to the armpits, stabbed in the chest. The news reported that the stabbing actually happened after she was already dead; apparently, she’d first been buried, then he smashed a rock onto her skull, killing her, and finally stabbed her. As I recall, she was 12.
I believe the point being made is that, in this thread, regarding that post especially, nobody gives a shit about your moral pronouncements, so hop off the high horse, ferchrissakes.
I just remembered a story from when I was in my twenties and working at a restaurant. There was a high school girl working there as a buser and dishwasher. She’d recently broken up with her boyfriend and he hadn’t taken it well. He called her on the phone shortly afterwards and asked her if she knew what a 9 millimeter handgun sounded like. She said, no. He said, “this is what it sounds like,” and shot himself so she could hear it over the phone.
I tried to write a song about it called “This is What it Sounds Like,” (because back then I tried to write songs about pretty much anything, and I thought it might have a “Jeremy” kind of grim, social commentary potential). I cobbled together a couple of workable variations and jammed them with my band, but it was ultimately too dark and sad for me and I ended up dropping it.
I remembered another - and then felt terrible that I forgot.
Sisters that came to my choir practice at church a few times, they were very nice, about my age (I was in grade 4). Then they weren’t there and I heard they had died the weekend before.
It seems their Step-dad dropped a lit cigarette when he dozed off on the couch and then went upstairs to bed. He woke up and discovered the fire and for reasons unknown, ran outside before waking the family. The open door caused the fire to spread HUGE and by the time he went around to the girls’ bedroom window, going out the front door was no longer an option.
The littlest girl, terrified by the fire, did what some kids do, she ran and hid in the closet. The older sister went back from the window to get her. They both died from the smoke.
I cried at the funeral after meeting the mom. The only thing I could say was, “I knew your daughters from choir.” She burst into tears (again) and said, “They loved coming to choir.”
I dreaded riding the school bus in the 8th grade because of a sophomore bully. Each day he’d pick some poor slob and make his life a living hell for about 30 minutes. He blew his head off with a shot gun after a fight with his father. I should have felt compassion when I heard, but I remember that I just felt like a weight had been taken off my shoulders.
My college girlfriend’s 17 year old brother was killed in an automobile accident on a scouting trip when he missed his exit and decided to make a U-turn at the bottom of the hill. He probably never saw the semi coming. The autopsy showed that he died by choking on a piece of gum he was chewing. He was an Eagle Scout, class valedictorian, National Merit Scholar, and seriously nice guy. What a friggin’ waste.
One of my classmates from highschool (would have been about 15 I guess) didn’t show up for school one Monday. Lots of whispering in the class when a teacher told us that he wouldn’t be coming back to school at all. Since his father worked for the local newspaper, there was an article in it the next day. Seems like the parents were going through a divorce, so the father took the son for a ride in his car, strangled him with his bare hands, and then killed himself. I didn’t even know his parents were getting a divorce.
A kid in my high school was killed by random crossfire. He was not in any way involved with illegal activities (he was already accepted to University of Michigan, and his parents were immigrants, the kind of hardworking, loyal, nose-clean asian kid stereotypes are made of), and it happened at a very middle-class pool hall in a perfectly safe neighborhood, where I often went myself.
I went to grade school with Margaret. She found out she had some kind of blood cancer the summer after we graduated 8th grade, and died soon after her sophomore year began. It was the first funeral I went to.
My senior year in high school, the brother of one of the guys who always used to pick on me in grade school died from a brain tumor. My parents wanted to me to go to the wake & funeral, and I didn’t want to cuz I thought of him as a jerk. They didn’t tell me to go, but convinced me that it would be the right thing to do. I remember seeing a lot of adults there, but no one else our age. Turns out, out of all of his classmates & friends, I was the only one he knew who showed up for either.
This is pushing the time frame a bit, but I still remember it. During college, me and a few friends were sitting in the cafeteria after a test. I saw this cute girl in line and pointed her out to the other guys. One of my friends suddenly went ‘Hey! You! In the cute jeans! Over here!’ I freaked out, but she knew him. She came over and talked to us for a while. A week later my friend told me that she and her boyfriend had been killed when his car hit a tree 10 feet off the ground after taking a hill or bump or something too fast. Both of them were drunk at the time.
My step-sister Pam. To tell the truth, Pam was always trouble. She was suspended from school at age 9 for sniffing paint thinner. But one day she was biking to school in the pouring rain. She had her hood up and maybe that hampered her visibility. In any case she biked out just in front of a large truck, was hit and killed.
When I was a high school sophomore, a friend of mine, a senior, on my baseball team lost control of his S10 coming to school one morning during a light rain. It rolled, he didn’t have a seat belt on, and was partially ejected and crushed to death. There were two other fatal car accidents involving my high school classmates that same year.
Senior year, there was a kid in my drivers’ ed. class who was very awkward, uncoordinated, and wore very thick glasses. In class he always drove tooo fast, the drivers’ ed car had a brake on the passenger side, and the teacher was always having to press it. The summer after our senior year, he crashed a four-wheeler and was pinned to a tree by it and asphyxiated.
In yet another incident in the fall after senior year, another baseball teammate of mine died. He was ‘accidentally’ shot in the stomach. The victim had gone hunting with several kids with whom I used to ride the school bus. The shooter claims he saw movement and shot in that direction. Before the incident, the shooter used to brag to other kids on the bus about torturing animals (like dogs and cats) and going hunting and drinking. He would describe his ‘hunting’ in very gory detail, such as about a deer still being alive and him having to shoot it in the head to finish it off. It was never listed as anything but an accident, but I have always had my suspicions about that one. A few years later, I saw an article about the shooter in the local paper for finding indian skulls in a cave out in the country while hunting. The story was very positive and talked about an anthropologist coming to investigate his discovery. Never heard anything else about it. Very creepy if you ask me. Fortunately I’ve moved away and lost track of the guy.
K was in the same Boy Scout troop as me, a little runty likeable guy with a knack for photography. For some insane reason, he joined the Army after graduation. Something happened in Basic, and he died choking on his own vomit.
That guy should never never have been in the Army at all.
The town I went to high school in had an unusually high death rate, according to the obit for the girl I remembered they had six deaths of high school students in a 7 year period. One girl I played soccer with, and with her sister, was 17 and rolled her car while driving with a friend. They were both ejected and she was killed.
One guy I went to high school with named Jake, very nice guy. Genuinely a gentleman, very athletic, played baseball and football and ran track. He went rock climbing without safety equipment one day, and fell and broke his neck. He was 21, which puts him maybe out of the range of kids but it was still a very rough thing to hear about.
To give you some perspective, this town has a high school with maybe 250 people in it, so when something like a death of a student happens it is a very close knit community. And apparently tragic deaths are unfortunately common for the place.
One kid that bullied me during high school died on his ATV when it fell on him going up a small slope. I remember not feeling happy but just relieved. Like oh it’s over.
There was this other kid in our first year of high school, I’ll call him Dave. Who wasn’t killed but probably wish he was. He was involved in a automobile accident that claimed the life of both his parents. He survived but was gone from school for a year. When he came back he was very quiet and talked very little, normally being quiet and reserved in High School would make you a target for bullies but people soon remembered who he was and knew what he had been through and left him alone.
He graduated from high school and we never saw him again. I then went to community college. I soon made good friends with a guy. He asked one day in college about what ever happen to Dave ? I was surprised he knew him since he was from a different High School. Turns out my friend was admitted to the same institution for severe depression and was there with Dave.
He told me the details of what Dave went through, Dave was there for shock . Their truck slammed into the back of a flatbed carrying some heavy gauge sheet metal. Upon impact it decapitated both of his parents , his fathers head ended up in the back seat with Dave.
E died from complications from diabetes – he was 12 and had been a friend of mine since I was 4. Our parents were on many of the same church committees and so we wound up hanging out together a lot. Like the viral meningitis story above, he got very sick, very fast, and nothing could be done.
P, 16, was my high school physics lab partner. She was a pretty blonde cheerleader, not like hippie me, but she was always friendly and a hard worker. Right after school let out for the year, she was driving to coach at an elementary school cheerleading clinic when she got hit by an oncoming car. The driver was speeding over the hump the railroad tracks made in the road in attempt to make his car airborne when he crossed the center line. P died a few hours after getting to the hospital. The passenger in the other car, who died as well, was a guy I knew from school as well. Sadly, he had just hit the 5 year remission mark from leukemia. The driver was his cousin, and all he had were bumps and bruises. He got a ticket and a fine, no jail time.
My friend K had an older sister who had Downs syndrome and a host of other birth defects. She died at 18, when K and I were 15.
TJ was an alright kid. I knew he got into some trouble sometimes but I still like him, and we played together alot. Tj and his friend were playing cops and robbers in the woods, and Tj faked hanging himself with a belt from the tree house we had all built (really just a wood platform.) Belt slipped or something and he actually did hang himself.
Ben was around 10 years old when 2 men broke into his house. They had been robbing houses in our neighborhood when they broke into theirs, thinking the family wasnt home. When they saw his mother downstairs, one stabbed her to death. They think Ben yelled from upstairs when he heard his mother scream. There was a 2X4 at the scene and he had blunt trauma wounds and stab wounds in both his chest and on his arms, indicating he had fought for his young life. Never understood how you could kill a small child like that, no matter how evil/disgusting you are.
Alexa was diagnosed with leukemia at a pretty young age. She was ~4 grades under me, but our town wasnt very big. Everyone knew about her, and just about everyone donated every time she had a fundraiser. I remember when she died every church in town had a memorial, and there is still a memorial for her about 6-7 years later.