The First Kid To Die From Your Year at School

Montessori school is evil.

Hm, well, I hate to say it but given that that was the case that strikes me as a little less weird.

A few months later I talked to Ally, who was depressed because her neighbor in the dorm had been murdered back home by a stalker ex-boyfriend. It was a story on campus, but I hadn't heard the details. Yeah, it was Melissa. Man, that broke me up for some reason.

I feel bad because I think of it in such abstract terms - I wasn't close enough to either for an emotional involvement, and it's just about how someone could do it at such a young age, what a waste and how it impacted everyone.

A baseball player at my high school named Jason was killed in a car wreck my senior year, while driving about 90 mph down a country road. He was an alright guy.

Strange. I'm not in regular touch with anybody in my class and haven't talked to anyone in it since the 10th reunion back in 1998, probably won't again until the 20th in 2008. And yet now I'm thinking of these two and just wondering...wondering.

This is a very good thread already, for all its obvious sorrow (and probably because of it, in ways).

In year 7 though a kid in year 9 died in a car accident, no one I knew; and when I was in yr 11, a guy in yr 12 (final year), who was head prefect and very popular and smart and geeky and an all round good guy, passed away on the last day of school, after a short battle with lukemia. Terrible thing, everyone in that year was shattered and it left a real pall over their leaving celebrations.

The weirdest one for me was a teacher. A few years after I left school one of my science teachers died in a car accident when the car he was driving slammed head first into a large boulder that was on the road around a blind corner, that he didnt see in time.

College - found out a few years ago that a fraternity brother of mine had died. He was camping in a park, and some kids robbed, shot, and burned him. Horrible way to go.

Just watched Kurosawa's "Ikiru" this weekend, which fits this thread - live your life to the fullest now, and leave no regrets.

Richard died in the eleventh grade. His car broke down at night and he was flagging down help when he was run over by another car driven by, of all people, his best friend; another classmate of ours.

Mike died in summer not long after graduation. I still don't know how.

Eric, a baseball teammate, died in a fall, while hiking in Oregon.

Marsha died with her boyfriend second year of college at Christmas break. They were saying goodnight in a car, stayed too long with the motor running and the carbon monoxide did them in. She was my closest friend of the bunch.

Gary drowned (5 years on) when the commercial fishing boat he worked on sank in a storm. I learned of this watching the news. We had both moved to the same area several hundred miles from our school. He was the class clown and we were baseball team mates.

I think of them from time to time.

For some stupid reason, I have that Jim Carroll tune " All the People Died" going thru my head.

I feel lucky that that's the only instance of a classmate of mine passing on that I can think of.

That is so horrible.

when i was in eighth grade a guy in my year was shot somehow, and one of his friends was shot in the hand. i hadn't even heard of the guy who died, but a lot of people knew him and it was sad. i didn't like the guy who got shot in the hand for stupid reasons so when he came back to school with his friend dead and these huge scars i felt really guilty.

the same year, a teacher committed suicide. it really shook people up because he was pretty well-liked, i guess (i didn't know him either) and it was less explicable than some random accident or act of violence. nobody i know has died yet, though. that's good.

A guy who was funny as hell died less than six months after graduation from high school while in the Army, when a jeep he was riding in rolled over. The same day (or maybe within a day or so) a guy who in the same circle of friends got killed in a motorcycle wreck. It was really bad.

Few months later another girl died on the interstate with her boyfriend getting hit head on by a drunk driver at night who didn't have his headlights on.

The worse death of someone that I went to school with that I know about was a guy that got killed a couple of years ago driving a gasoline truck. Someone swerved into his semi and it rolled blowing up. What a god awful way to go. The bad thing was that I was driving to my home town that night and got caught up on the interstate, as it was stopped and turned around and went home. A day later or so, I found out what happened.

A guy that I played football with that had a scholarship lined up got killed in a shooting and the person wasn't aiming for him at all.

The hardest death of someone from school that I have come across was someone from the dorms in college and kept track of somewhat as he ended up living a couple of blocks away in Indianapolis. This guy was so clean cut, a fun guy, lived the right way, was quite athletic, got married and had two small kids. He played softball one night and came home showered and went to bed and died in his sleep from some undiagnosed heart ailment. 28 years old, had a masters degree, had been married for four years and had two tiny kids. It was very sad.

The first guy I knew in high school to die was a couple years ahead of me. Within a year after he graduated he committed suicide by standing in a bathtub filled with water and intentionally dropping a clock radio into it.

Real horrorshow. REAL horrorshow.

Death is the great equalizer.

OTM there.

midway through my senior year one of my closest friends at the time killed himself. worst thanksgiving ever. not an exaggeration whatsoever.

wtf elvis telecom?

My sister's class three grades below mine lost what seemed like one kid per year a la Spinal Tap drummer: the little boy killed riding his bike, the girl who went to sleep and didn't wake up due to undetected heart condition. I can't remember the others; these were just the two that were her friends or near neighbours.

As far as I'm aware, no one else has died since.

Reading alot of the stories above, it seems that I have been very lucky in that I can only recall 1 death from my year at school. It was after we'd left school & I believe he died from an asthma attack. He was in my drama class, but I didn't really know him. Two of our teachers committed suicide. The female teacher was after we left school & I'm not really sure of any details. The other was male & killed himself (according to the rumours, although I have no idea if it was true) because he had been caught with a young boy.

When I was 18 my best friend called me to tell me that my then-girlfriend's best friend, who was also a friend of his, had died of a lung infection after going into remission with lung cancer. I had to tell her - it was a strange and horrible thing to do, as she was convinced her friend had turned the corner and was going to get better. I cringe at the thought, but I actually said "you'd better sit down" before I told her. It seemed the right thing to do.

This thread is an excellent argument for gun control, cancer research, and better public transportation systems.

Since leaving high school there has been a couple of disease-related deaths of people I didn't know, and one suicide by a girl I did know and liked a lot.

A strange yet interesting thread.

I remember the day of the funeral there was about 5 inches of snow, it was really creepy, very unusual for Ireland. When I was about 15 a guy in the year ahead of us committed suicide aswell.

The atmosphere in a school after something like that is one I'll never forget, everything just felt quite stunned. Have to say it was sort of school policy, as a Jesuit school, to help the family through and offer to host the funeral etc, and to some extent they did but the atmosphere this created was pretty grisly. I can only imagine how younger kids felt, wreaths everywhere and things.

The hell?

I posted this on the wrong thread, so repost:

In college, I had a Medical Ethics instructor who was one of the coolest instructors there. We'd get into lively debates about all sorts of things. One particular time we were talking about how organ transplant lists should be prioritized, and after one person's opinionated argument, he just turned away from us and let the discussion continue unmoderated by him.
A few weeks after the class ended, I heard that he'd died of heart problems. He'd been awaiting a transplant. Nobody had known.

In high school, I was on the track team with a girl named Liz, who was 2 years behind me. She wasn't a very good runner at first, so she'd run in the back with me (I was the slowest on the team). She was a sweet girl. Shortly after I graduated, she was killed by a van while running on the road, a hit and run. The impact of the car knocked her running shoes off--for some reason I remember that detail from the paper. Her wake was really strange and sad.

About five years ago, our head cheerleader/prom queen was killed in a murder-suicide by the man (who was 25 years older) she was living with. Ugh.

In my year, there was a guy who I was friends with. He was part of a group of stoners & generally likeable losers who I was a part of extremely briefly during freshman year. He was definitely the smartest and had the most potential of the bunch, I always hoped he would stop hanging around with them and get out of town at some point. He played a little guitar and we used to hang out after school and play Pantera and Slayer songs. He and his group of friends were out on a boat on some lake getting trashed a couple years out of high school, he ended up falling overboard and drowning somehow. Sad...I often think I see people who like him in airports and whatnot and forget that he's dead.

Oh, and on the opposite side, a few weeks ago the little brother of a jazz piano player who I used to play with in my grade killed someone while driving drunk. He's going to jail.

About a year earlier, a kid named Troy was murdered. He was a big guy, good looking and kind of a rebel, a really good fighter (we had fights at least once a day in my high school), but generally pretty easy-going--I've seen him beat a kid's ass and then sit down on the sidewalk with him to have a smoke and compliment each other on their toughness. Just about everybody liked Troy, even the teachers who had to put up with his antics. He was stabbed in the chest with a hunting knife by another 19-year old kid from the next town over who had some beef with Troy's brother. The ambulance didn't get there quickly enough.

After I graduated, one of my classmates was in a one-car accident (I think he was drunk) and ended up a vegetable. He was a fiddle player and rodeo rider. The only fatality that I know of from my actual grade is highly bizzare: I didn't know her well as she had moved to town just a year or two before graduation. Apparently she died doing volunteer work at one of the area's historical mines--one that was no longer in use and used to teach kids about how they did it in the old days, I guess. One of the big ore carts (you know, the kind that ran on tracks laid through the mine) filled with rock came loose and rolled down an incline, hitting her and then squashing her against the wall of rock at the end of the line. She had four kids already at the age of about 26.

Clint was in my junior year math class, when we came back senior year, I heard that he'd had an epileptic fit and died over the summer.

Another guy who was a year or two ahead of me killed himself with a shotgun in his girlfriend's driveway because she broke up with him.

There may have been one or two more.

another guy who my sister knew in high school (i think he was a senior when she was a freshman) got lost at sea. he went out on a family fishing trip of some sort and was never seen again. they didnt even find the bodies either, which didnt help much with closure and that kinda stuff..

The first schoolfriend I had, going back to nursery school, died suddenly in his sleep, b/c he had an air bubble in his bloodstream. That was grim, especially seeing his parents and sister at the funeral.

I think there was a person who o/d-ed as well, though I'm not sure if it was before or after.

The worst thing is that someone who was in my year raped and murdered a very young child. It really freaked me out seeing his face in the local paper, b/c even though it was s.th. like 18 years since I saw him at school, he didn't look much different. My vague memories of him are that he was very normal and average. Who can understand what would motivate a person to do something like that? I can't.

It's not something a 'sane' person can appreciate, as dictated by the concept of sanity itself.

During my sophomore year in college another sophomore shot herself in the English department building. I hadn't known her very well, because she was part of the sorority set, but earlier that term she had been in my English class and I once had her come to my place because I was trying to help her with something from the class.

Nobody died after that for about eight years. Then some girl, two years younger than me & in my brother's year & his friend in fact killed herself with exhaust fumes in a car. I didn't know her personally, but I'd answered the phone when she was calling my brother, and he was pissed off about it obviously, so it was even more interesting.

Nearly a year to the day after that, my brother did exactly the same thing. That was very interesting indeed.

He was one of the most intelligent kids in school, but he had this odd streak of meanness about him that he couldn't seem to control. All throughout junior high and high school, we were both part of this loose group of anti-social nerds that clustered together whether we liked it or not, mainly not. He bullied a bunch of the other kids in those group, 'cause they were really the only kids he could bully, as he was short and not especially athletic. (He did once manage to humiliate me in gym class by repeatedly slapping my arm in the middle of a wrestling match, and no, I don't understand it either.) During a summer off from college, I caught a friend of mine (she was a year below me) waitressing at a local T.G.I.Friday's, and when she told me he died in car accident not long after our graduation, what hit immediately was that he didn't even live long enough to wise up.

There was one teacher in my junior high school (he wasn't my teacher, I must stress) who once or twice pursed his lips at me. I had no idea what that was about: I figured it could've been a slightly odd facial tic, or an attempt at flirting, and while I wondered if he could tell if I was gay, I didn't think much of it.

Some years later, I was watching Oprah, and one of her guests mentioned my very same school and that very same teacher: he was convicted for molesting one (maybe more?) of his students, and later killed himself in jail.

I didn't know her very well, but it was the first time that I had known someone that wasn't related to me and over seventy-years old to die. My mother took me to the cemetary a few days after the burial. The tombstone wasn't there yet, but they had one of those weird foil markers planted in the ground. I do remember feeling a bit chilled from reading "1973" on her birthday, the same year that I was born.

And then there was the time that my friend MacCauley was stung to death by a swarm of killer bees...

A guy I'd hung out with a good bit in high school died three years after graduation when he fell about 100 feet on a construction site he was working on.

Weird how it happens, or doesn't. One of my best friends in high school flipped his van one afternoon. Not a scratch. A couple of years later, he plowed his Duster into a phone pole, taking down the pole. Again, he walked away from it. And he's still here today.

brother's best friend since we were very, very young (about 3 and 4), grew up across the street from us. he was working as a Forest Service ranger in Arizona, and went out for a solo overnight hike one day. Never came back. I helped with the search process, but I had the impression the search was more of a therapeutic exercise than an actual search. those canyons of Sedona are not the place to look for a body. about four years ago, I think. I see his parents all the time. The worst thing about it is that, out of three kids, they've lost two before the age of 25.

another school friend sold weed to the wrong person. he was found chopped up in a barrel floating in the hillsborough river.

friend took a hall pass to use the restroom and ended up shooting himself in the head outside of class instead.

junior year of college a girl in my class was thrown off a bridge and killed by her husband.

A guy a couple of years below me at school died of meningitis at school. Actually at school. In front of people.

(xpost)
My little brother just had a classmate killed in Iraq too.