Your childhood stories of that kid who got killed

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
101

Danny was Angie’s 7 year old brother and he died after being hit by a car when i was 10. Everybody gave some change to send flowers.

David died after having a seizure in the cafeteria, he would have been 12 or 13. I didn’t know him.

Crystal died at 17 after a long illness, i was only acquainted with her. I didn’t go to the services but i was glad she wasn’t suffering

Tim died at 19. I had jewelry class with him and , didn’t like him but i still thought he had been too young to die. I don’t know the cause.

Sydnee died at 20 in a car accident. I didn’t know her and i do not know if alcohol was involved. Tim and Sydnee would have been in my sister’s graduating HS class. [97]

Toni was 24, and died in a car crash caused by a cop’s driving recklessly. She was an RN and had a daughter. I knew her well, and thought that her death was a complete waste, and proof that life was complete crap sometimes. She was in some of the same classes as I.

102

Rocky played the saxophone in the band when we were both in 7th grade. We weren’t close friends, but what I did know, I really liked. Smart kid, funny as hell. Apparently he and a friend found a non-working rifle in a dump, and found out that it actually did work, when Rocky was shot and killed. He was 13.

Terrible, terrible waste.

103

They were four older brothers of kids I knew in Jr High. I never knew them, just knew their younger siblings in my grade. Supposedly, they were the backfield of the HS football team. One night, they decided to go drinking under age at a local bar. As the story goes, they got way drunk and then tried to drive home in an an old Nissan station wagon.

They got the car up to around 60 and tried to make a 90 degree left turn onto a side street. And thats when they met the Elm. The Elm was a nice tree, probably had been growing for well over 100 years. At one time its branches had been low enough that neighborhood kids probably climbed on them, but that had been easily 20-30 years before. That night, she had a diameter about 2 1/2 feet across. There was no contest, btw. The car lost. Its tires hit the curb next to the Elm and the roof tipped right into it. The Nissan station wagons of that era were not tanks by any means and the roof (and indeed the whole car) caved around that Elm like an empty beer can around the hand of someone who was angry. But with four people inside. No one survived.

I remember how for the next two weeks that summer, all the kids dared each other to go see the wreck at the local junk yard / impound lot. The parents didn’t object too strongly, thinking it would be good for them to see what happens when you drink and drive. The grieving families had other business to attend to. I was one of the kids who went to see the wreck. I remember seeing the twisted aluminum and the dried blood that had splattered nearly everywhere, from the dashboard all the way back to the carpet by the cargo area. I remember seeing a funny shaped brown thing next to the red-encrusted chrome of a seat-belt release. I thought it was weird to see a seatbelt holder still sticking oddly up from between the folds of the back seat within all that twisted metal. The brown thing next to it seemed about 2 inches long and looked stuck to the seat by dried blood. It looked really familiar to me. Still, it took me almost 2 full minutes to realize that it was a finger.

Later that summer, the town cut down the Elm. No one said why at the time, but somehow we all knew. I think the official story I heard someone say after was that it was too close to some power lines. After it was gone, I remember riding my bike there. I even stood on its stump; its how I know how wide it was. The wood was all gone, either taken by the town or by people on the street. What a shock it must be, I thought, the day someone threw one of those logs on their fire and had their living room filled not only with the scent of burning wood, but the scent of burning blood.

104

A lad we knew called Darren died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 10. He’d got home from school one afternoon and complained to his mum that he had a headache, pain got worse and worse, then he passed out and never woke up.

105

Dio, please resist the urge to lay down black-and-white moral pronouncements about others’ stories, esp. when you don’t have the facts quite straight.

twickster, MPSIMS moderator

106

  1. There was a girl who got off the school bus in 6th grade. There were some kids in the back of the bus who were cutting up. The bus driver looked up in the rearview mirror to yell at the kids in the back of the bus, and he let his foot up off the brake while he was yelling. The girl, who had to cross the road in front of the bus to get to her house, had dropped her book and bent down to pick it up. Out of his peripheral vision, the bus driver didn’t see her so he started driving and ran over her. :frowning: (* Note, the kids in the back of the bus blamed themselves for years for that.)

  2. In 5th grade, a girl died from Hodgkins’ lymphoma. Nobody knew she’d been sick; just that she’d been out of school a lot. I guess they went in to remove her spleen or something and she didn’t make it through the surgery. That was sad too.

107

I remembered a few more…

There was Greg, the troubled younger brother of a friend of mine, who had gotten heavily into drugs. Greg was a couple of years younger than us. When I was 15 or 16, Greg ran away from home, and was found a few days later hanging from a tree. With his hands tied behind his back. AFAIK, the police never got to the bottom of that one.

Scott, the kid who lived a few houses up the street from me growing up, was born with cystic fibrosis. We all (the neighborhood kids) knew Scott’s days were numbered right from the start. I can’t remember exactly when he succumbed to the disease, but it was much later than expected - I’m sure I was past 18, and Scott was a year younger than me.

And, speaking of CF… this one might not qualify, as they were kids I didn’t know. My high school had a full-blown planetarium on campus, and there was a “planetarium aide” class that involved running the place, and the teacher/planetarium director, Mrs. DeVore, only allowed two students per period. I took the class my sophomore through senior years. So, I got rather close to Mrs. DeVore - I mean, we weren’t buddy-buddy or anything, but when you’re working with someone one-on-one for an extended period of time you tend to talk a bit about your personal life. Anyway, both of her kids had cystic fibrosis, which, as I remember it, was a big deal because the odds of it happening we so small. Her daughter died at 13 my junior year, and her son was several years younger; I lost touch with Mrs. DeVore after high school, but it’s been 21 years, so I can only assume the kid is no longer with us.

And finally, there was the kid who moved in directly across the street from me when I was 15. The man had lived there since before we moved to the neighborhood; he was a black Episcopalian minister, and his church was up in Oakland. He met and married a woman from there who had three kids, and the middle boy was my age, and a hardcore gangster-type. I don’t even remember his name; soon after he moved in, we got in a tussle one night, which carried into school the next day, resulting in both of our suspensions. We didn’t have anything to do with each other after that, but I remember a few years later I stopped seeing him around, and I just assumed he’d moved out. Well, when I was 22 or 23, the youngest kid was 16 or 17, and had been hanging out with my younger brother, so I got to know her a bit. One night I asked her whatever happened to whatsisname… turns out he was killed in a car accident when we were 18.

108

I’ll add mine.

One night when I was about 9 or 10, I awoke to see red and white lights and shadows of flames on my bedroom wall. I looked outside the window and saw the house across the street was ablaze. I ran downstairs and outside and my mother sent me back to bed but before I had the chance to comply, I witnessed the entire top floor of the neighbor’s house collapse.

I found out the next day that the fireman had grabbed one of the 16 year old twins that lived there but the other died when the roof caved in.

109

19 year old Mary taught the youngest Sunday School class. She was a nice girl, sweet and funny, being in her class was the only time I enjoyed Sunday school. Somebody opened the back door of a van on her as she cycled past. She hit her head on the curb and died instantly. Her much older brother and sister also taught Sunday school, the sister had a hunch back, it impressed on me that being religious didn’t give you a pass.

My Dad was a teacher. He was the one called when a girl at his school collapsed. She’d complained of a bad headache half an hour before. There was nothing he could do, she was profoundly unconcious and died in hospital some hours later. It turned out she had hit her head in a car accident three months earlier and it was a blood clot that killed her, Dad was told she was already brain dead by the time he had seen her. It was after this that the county appointedf school nurses in the secondary schools. Not that a nurse would have made a difference to that poor girl but they felt it would have saved the teachers from the anguish of feeling so helpless if a professional had been in charge.

110

A couple of guys in their 20s showed up one day at my high school posing as plainclothes police officers and asked for a student presumably for questioning on some matter (I can’t remember his name now, and I swore I’d never forget it).

Their fake IDs and badges must’ve looked convincing because the student was released to the two “cops” who then drove the kid over to the next town about 50 miles away.

They locked him in a warehouse-type structure, tied him up with unraveled coat hangers, and beat & tortured him before shooting & killing him.

This was all because one of the dudes had an insane crush on the kid’s high school girlfriend.

111

Some of these stories are enough to never let me leave my kids out of my sight.

112

Jeremy seemed like a pretty nice guy. We ran in different social circles, and he mostly hung around with the proto-Goth set. A lot of people with black fingernail polish and spiked hair. He was the quiet, somewhat normal-looking guy among them. He always seemed kind of edgy, like he felt someone was following him, or staring at him. He seemed to have a decent number of friends, and our few interactions were cordial. His friends often got teased. Proto-Goths in North Texas about twenty years ago were very unusual. I could tell it bothered him when his friends were teased, but he never said anything. A couple of times I ran off some bullies who were teasing them, and he just gave me a deer in the headlights look, like he didn’t understand what I had done or why. His mom transferred him to another school and he shot himself in English class one morning.

Brad was a good guy. Not a good student, not a gentleman, but the kind of rough-hewn friend you could have and keep for life. He was older than me but he was one of the first friends I made when I transferred into the school. He kept the other upperclassmen from picking on me too much and taught me a lot about how to handle public school(I was homeschooled until high school). He and his girlfriend had a lot of trouble with their relationship, she was a lot younger(in Junior High), and after a miscarriage, they had decided to make a life together. He had dropped out of school due to family issues(stemming from his relationship) in his senior year, but was starting to go back to community college and had a job and was holding his own. His girlfriend was expecting again and was looking forward to them being a family. One night as he was closing up at work, a drunk and high gunman came in, robbed ~$400 out of the till, and shot him and his co-worker in the head.

Steven

113

“Ziggy” was a guy we didn’t spend much time with in high school, but we all liked him and he would sit with us at lunch sometimes. The year after graduation he died while cave diving in a local spring. I don’t know if he got lost down there, or the equipment malfunctioned or what.

My teenagers have lost two friends within the last year. One was shot in his own kitchen in the wee hours of the morning, by an intruder who has yet to be found. The other collapsed and died while doing “whippits” at a party.

114

My brother dated a woman who used to live in Richardson. She was down the hall in another classroom when the gun went off.

115

Chris was a kid who rode the bus with me during Jr. high. He choked himself by trying to lift wieghts that were tied by a rope around his neck.

Worse then death, a neighborhood boy who was friends with my oldest brother crashed his motorcycle right after high school graduation in 1985. He has been in an unrecoverable coma ever since, but is not brain dead. To this day his brain shows activity and his body can survive without aid other than needing to be feed and supplied fluids.

116

Lets see:
One of my classmates dies from leukemia when I was in primary school. That was my first experience of someone I knew dying. My class formed a guard of honour at the funeral.

When I was in year 7 a girl in year 10 (Rosemary) died from a brain hemorrhage while she was being airlifted to hospital. The day before I had found her vomiting while trying to take pain killers for her headache. when I asked if I could help her she said she would be fine. I had a hideous dream about killing everybody who touched me that night. When I found out about her death the next morning at school I became convinced that that I had something to do with her death. Unfortunately this became an issue again later after I had fully developed my mental illness where I was convinced that I could cause people to die just by being in their presence.

In year 9 a school came to out town on excursion and visited the local rice silos. They were playing around on the rice in one silo when a worker unaware of what was going on turned on one of the big fans which helped dry the rice. Unfortunately this turned the rice into rice quicksand and 1 kid was sucked under to suffocate. The entire town helped to dig the kid out. My maths teacher found the body. He came back to school with the whitest face I had ever seen.

When I was 23 or 24 my best friend Petrina died from a heart attack. She suffered from anorexia and we had become friends in the psych ward.

117

Benji was a developmentally disabled boy I had often seen in the hallways at high school and spoken to once or twice. One day in February he had an argument with his mother and ran away. Two days later they found him dead of hypothermia, curled up under the bench in the dugout of a little league field one block from my house. He was 16.

118

Steven was in 6th grade when he got a terminal brain tumor. He did well enough for the next year and stayed in school even though everyone knew what was going to happen. The summer after 7th grade, we took a school sponsored field trip to Washington D.C. on a plane and everything which was a big deal for most kids growing up in rural Louisiana. Steven went with us and he had his head shaved from treatments. Kids can be cruel but everyone made sure he got VIP treatment for this one and we had a great time. About a month after we got back, he got sent to the hospital for his final fight. Something like the “Make a Wish Foundation” arranged for Stevie Wonder to call him on the phone and sing “I just called to say I love you” which was his favorite song and became his funeral song a couple of months later.

That wouldn’t be the worst story in the world if not for the fact that his father worked on on-shore oil rigs and was killed about a year after that when someone dropped a piece of machinery from height on top of his head killing him instantly. I am not sure how his mother made it but she hung in their for the remaining child.

119

R dropped out of high school and later shot himself with his parents’ rifle when his girlfriend broke up with him.

Two guys from my high school–one a senior and another a recent graduate–left school early one day and went for a drive in the country. They apparently didn’t pay attention as they went through an intersection, because they didn’t notice the dumptruck coming down the road. Both were killed.

At the beginning of 1982 a girl and her mother were found dead in their home. Initially it was thought that a burglar had done it but after an investigation the police determined that the mother had shot her daughter and then killed herself.

The daughter lived a few days on life support. Some of my schoolmates went to say goodbye to her.

A couple of my sister’s schoolmates died in car crashes (one may have been a suicide.) The younger brother of one of her high school friends died in a freak accident–he had been helping to dig a crawl space for one of the teachers and the dirt collapsed on him. Before they could dig him out he had suffocated. His father died a couple years later.

My brother’s civics teacher in middle school was a right wing anti tax type–were he alive today he’d probably be a teabagger. One night for some strange reason someone left the car ignition on in the garage and by the time anyone came to check he, his wife, and his two school age sons were dead of CO poisoning.

120

By the time I was in my early 20s, about 15 of my peers had died. Mostly car wrecks but a couple suicides, a couple ODs, a couple dumb accidents, and one shot by the cops. My wife is almost exactly the same age as me and she has never known anyone in her peer group who has died. I ran with a much rougher crowd than her.

I’m not a child anymore but just last week I found out that someone I worked with all throughout the spring of this year died. She locked her keys in her 4th story apartment and tried to climb up to the (presumably unlocked) window instead of calling the maintenance crew. She fell. Very promising young lady who had already survived a lot.