Dead classmates

3 of my classmates died in car wrecks during our senior year. In grade school, a buddy died of cancer. I think of these people often.

• At my school it was always the stupid ones that died right away, I was never particularly surprised.

  Just%20saying

• [quote]I think of these people often. Why?? It's not like you could have done anything to prevent their deaths.

• The class ahead of me (19 graduates) has had a terrible time. I think of them often as well. This year is their 50th. Attendance will be low.

• Dead friends and acquaintances. Wrote a song about it wanna hear it here it go...

  http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3Dvkur2epZhyc

  Jim%20Carroll

• For me, looking back now at my high school years it seems like a time when so many friends and acquaintances died, disappeared, were in violent incidents or in bad circumstances. I was in high school '76 - '80. A group of people died (drowned) at a theatre workshop when they went out in canoes late at night during a huge storm, three siblings died as well as two others. None of the other people there would/could explain what had gone on or why they would have gone out in such a bad storm. There was a bad suicide attempt at the school and in quick succession three suicides and many attempts.  A friend was at his best friend's house waiting for him to finish cutting the grass, a rock got sucked up by the lawn mower and spit out hitting him in the head and killing him instantly. I heard from his brother that the rock had gone thru the bone in his forehead, thru his brain and ending up cracking open the back of his scull. The kid who had been cutting the grass ended up in a psych hospital for over a year. One guy's dad was a Vietnam vet and pretty regularly, and violently, beat his wife and three kids. At a school assembly a teacher got mad at one of the students sitting on the highest row of the bleachers and snapped. He walked up to the kid and beat the crap out of him, knocking him down several rows of bleachers, he followed him down the bleachers hitting him every chance he had. When the guy had been punched all the way down to the gym floor he grabbed him by his arm and dragged him out of the gym. Neither ever came back to the school There was a guy who was at a party and got too drunk and too high, he sat down or passed out on his way walking home down the railroad tracks and froze to death before a train ran him over.  There was a girl whose mother had mental health problems would throw her out of the house with only the clothes on her back, sometimes in winter, in the Chicago suburbs where a lot of the winter is way below zero, with no coat, and wouldn't let her back in for days. She couch surfed but wouldn't let any one call the police because she said it would make it worse for her.  Two girls cut the last class of the day and they were hanging out in one of the girls bathrooms. One of them started a garbage can on fire, something went wrong and they ended up trapped inside the bathroom.  (I think a hall monitor had locked the bathroom with out checking to make sure it was empty. It had happened before to several other girls)  When a maintenance guy went into the bathroom and try to put out the fire he had a heart attack and died. One of the girls survived and was charged with two instances of murder, she was tried as an adult and got 25 years jail time. There was a freak accident with two groups of friends from the same circle of friends in differant cars hitting head on killing seven people.  None of them were drunk or high and the witnesses said that each car had been driving fine right up until the accident.  At first we thought they might have been playing chicken and screwed up, but it was on a busy road with a lot of other people driving. Each group had been going to events in neighboring towns, one nearest the north side of our town and one nearest the east, but neither were driving the quickest or easiest routes. It seemed like they had gone out of their way to be on the same road.. I use to buy pot from a friends brother who was a cop. One night he and his brother both disappeared. Neither left with anything more than the clothes they were wearing. The cop hadn't even brought his wallet or badge.  No one has ever seen or heard from them since. There wasn't much of an investigation of it either. A girl who hitchhiked a lot disappeared. It seemed as if once the cops learned that she was a hitchhiker they quit looking for her. There was a girl that I was pretty close friends with, who went to a Led Zeppelin concert with me and about twenty friends and completely disappeared during the show. No one has ever seen or heard from her since. When I talked with the cops they asked a lot about her drug use. I think they thought she ran off with other "druggies" she met at the concert. Again there didn't seem to be much investigation. I don't think she was the run away type but it was easier to believe that she had somehow run away with just the clothes on her back, on a really cold early spring night, than think of the other things that probably happened to her. One of my friends was murdered by John Wayne Gacy. I've never written all of these down before. Damn, there were a LOT of odd deaths and violent episodes while I was in high school. I know someone is going to EST me but these are all true.

• We're so sorry, Cassie.

  Principal Morton

• Miss R5? Get a blog.

• R5 Write all the stuff down so you have it when you are older and you can no longer remember it all. There are three classmates that I know of that are dead. All of them girls. Two died in separate car crashes and another from a drug overdose.

• 9/11, with no mention of the losses at the reunion a few months later. Shitty and shittier.

• Nothing really bizzare or tragic happened to any of my classmates unless you count teen pregancies but my cousin had a bunch of people she went to school with die,most were in car accidents.

• I was in college and was assigned a team mate for a project. He never showed up. Went to class, teacher raged about what slacker he was then finally some girl started crying and said he died in a motorcycle accident. Thy planted a tree. Bitch full of herself teacher shut up real fast.

• Too bad you didn't think of them when they were alive, when it mattered. Perhaps you could've made a difference in their lives. One that would've prevented their early demise.

• Holy veal R5. Did you all happen to survive a near fatal bus crash but were saved by the visions of a clairvoyant classmate prior to all These freak incidents?

  Thats%20some%20final%20destination%20level%20stuff...

• R5, that is crazy. The 70s and 80s were wild.

• I hope a lot of my classmates are dead. I didn't retain any friends from school, and haven't had any contact with the few I had in high school since leaving it. The closest I can relate to this thread is remembering this girl who was plump, but it was because she had a kidney transplant and it was the anti-rejection drugs. Everybody liked her, she was very nice, and is probably long dead now.

• I know R7 was just being cunty, but seriously R5, you should get a blog. I would read that.

• I agree with r16 - I want to read r5's stories as a blog or even better, a book - with photos and with updates. Your friend being a victim of Gacy tells me you grew up close to Chicago. I did too. Maybe that is part of why I want to know more. In terms of the girl who disappeared at the concert - is she on the Charly project website for missing people?

• I graduated high school with Paul Broussard whom some of you may remember as the victim of a gay hate-crime in Houston. He was beaten to death after leaving a gay bar by 10 young men. Since many of killers were under 18, his mother sued their parents in a civil case which was broadcast on Court TV. (Before it became TruTV). Paul was very nice and always friendly. He didn't deserve to die like that.

  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Paul_Broussard

• Not my high school but one nearby had a facebook page dedicated to grads who died. There was one street where all sorts of people died too young -- from accidents, health problems, murders, and suicides. I know the street and it isn't unique in any visible way, but seeing all the young faces in the memorial photos was disconcerting.

• A lot of suicides in my high school class (of 1981). Right after I graduated, a guy shot himself because his girlfriend dumped him. He had just turned 19. A guy in my class who later became a cop hanged himself in his basement. My own personal belief was he killed himself because he was gay and couldn't come to terms with it. Of course, there were probably other issues, but for some reason, I think being closeted probably pushed him over the edge. A girl I went to high school also hanged herself about 4 years after high school. I think that depression just totally decimated her life - she was really bright and social in high school, but when I worked with her for a time in a nursing home (I was a nurses' aide and she worked in the kitchen), she just seemed to be spiraling down (not going to college, working a dead-end job, etc.). A few more people from high school have died, but from illness rather than suicide. Most were from cancer and they were all "too young" to die. I think of these people from time to time, especially when I go back to my hometown for the holidays.

• It's strange that they say only 1 out of 10,000 people commit suicide, yet almost everyone knows someone who's done it. I know someone who did, and I certainly don't know anywhere near 10,000 people.

• 1987, a neighbor boy a year or two below me was walking along the train tracks close to the high school with some friends... I'm not sure exactly what happened, but they ended up scooping him out of the tracks. A year earlier, I'd been an exchange student in a small Australian town until I was kicked out after a very excessive depressive drunken episode. Back in the states I got a surprise phone call months later from one of my friends... had I heard from Tim? No... It turned out that his parents were getting divorced, he had gone out with friends and gotten very drunk, wandered home and fallen into a small river that ran through town. Found his body weeks later.

• My roommate from college orientation died a few years after we graduated. A fraternity brother killed himself about 10 years after graduation. I rarely think about them. There was one guy I went to HS with, a hot hunky football jock with a fat cock. He died of a heart attack in his early 20's (he was heavy, lineman built). So sad.

• When I was in college, all the freshmen started knocking themselves off. This was a few years after that big North Chicago suicide cluster.

• [quote]Why?? It's not like you could have done anything to prevent their deaths. Cutting the brake lines on the cars belonging to the three killed in automobile "accidents" did not help matters. I think this is a cry for help and absolution.

• He "later" became a cop after his suicide R20? WTF!

• You're right R21, they're lying. The suicide rates are way underreported. That said, it's an annual rate, meaning if you live 50 years the rate would be 100 in 10,000 rather than 2 in 10,000.

• I don't think about them that much, but a number of people I grew up with (Class of '01) are dead. When I do think about it though it's incredibly sad to me how much they never got to experience. If I had died when I was 17, my life would have been very unfulfilled.

• I started NYU in the Fall of 1988. Four people killed themselves, one after another, that Fall, in dormitories on the same block. After one occurred, it appears that the others were copycats. The first one jumped out her window on the 12th floor, and she fell past my window as I slept. I didn't know any of these people personally, but it still cast a horrible vibe over the school, and especially those two dorms. What's extra fucked up for me was that my aunt, my cousin, AND my cat died that same semester.

• I never kept up. I learned of classmates' deaths several months, or even more than a year, after the fact. I lost one classmate this year, around May, from MS. I learned of it over the summer. I learned about a year ago that a classmate, to whom I was more friendly, died in July 2010 (reason unknown to me). I'm in my early-40s. I have lost probably around five classmates. (At least that I know about right now.) And everyone moved on. So, this isn't a topic I care to think about. But it does make me further appreciate being alive.

• I went to high school in a small town far from where I live (and my parents also left 25 years ago) and don't care to be a Facebooker. Once a year or so I'll look at the websites for the two funeral homes in town to see if there are any familiar names in their obituaries. A couple of the girls died in the last 2 years - both mid-40s and and one of them a grandma. I'm sure others are dead who moved off or used different funeral parlors. Sad.

• My senior year (1980), one girl drank a fifth of booze and died from alcohol poisoning. I was talking to a classmate at her funeral that ended dying about three weeks later in a single car accident when he hit a tree. Haven't thought about Marie or Glenn in year.

• I started 1st grade with Terry. By the time we were in 9th grade, I was blowing and fucking him. I was very discreet. Then he made the fatal mistake of messing with this flaming queen who blabbed on Terry. A couple of days later, he ran head on into a highway pylon. Terry died instantly. This was in 1971. I found out senior year that another guy named Mike I'd gone to school with since the 2nd grade, had Terry as a fuck buddy too. Two days after we graduated, Mike got in the ocean at Daytona while tipsy, and drowned in the undertow. Two others in my class died on that trip. In September, we had our 40th reunion. There were at least 10 guys there with their wives, who still smoke pole.

• R5 takes the cake on this one. I moved far away from my hometown after college, so I lost touch with everyone from there. I'm only aware of a couple deaths since high school. One was a kid I used to hang out with my freshman and sophomore years, then we gravitated to different crowds. We weren't great friends but we used to go to parties together. Anyway, he was murdered in his late 20s in a drug deal gone wrong. I didn't even know he had gotten into drugs, so I was surprised when I found out. Another girl I was friends with my senior year and we used to hang out sometimes when I came home from college. I found out she committed suicide a few years later.

• Empty chairs at empty lunchroom tables.

• A friend was stalked for several years by someone we went to school with, who used to leave horrible racist messages about her interracial relationship, until he conveniently died of a heroin overdose. At least 4 of my mid 90s classmates have OD'd. Maybe Kurt made it seem cool to them.

• During my senior year of high school, when the yearbook came out there was a full-page portrait of some girl who died, with a big weepy tribute about her. Everybody was saying, "Who the hell was that?" Ours was a small school and there was no way something like a death would not have been all over the gossip circuit. We all wondered what prompted a big tribute like that. I still think it was some kind of a hoax because so many people had never heard of her.

• People piss and moan on this board about crime, but the US was infinitely more violent and wild in the 70s and 80s as someone points out. RIP Trey, Nate, Bill, Doug, and Junior, likely killed by Glenn's dad James although the body has never been found.

  DC%20was%20a%20nightmare

• I've known people who died but it freaks me out when they lose their minds. Friends of mine are homeless, jobless, and miserably alone in life. Truly terrible.

• [quote]Friends of mine are homeless, jobless, and miserably alone in life. Well, the latter two conditions describe 3/4 of the population of Datalounge.

• You people have a point--there were more fatal accidents and suicides in the seventies. More overdoses and car accidents. People were more reckless about booze, alcohol and driving. Also, domestic violence wasn't really taken seriously and it was still acceptable to beat your kids. There was terrible serial killers around as well.

• In the seventies it was cool to take quaaludes with booze. Crazy! Also, cocaine was not considered to be addictive and LSD was taken without a care. Drugs were everywhere in the seventies and I don't know how we all survived the times.

• People had fewer assets to protect. An arrest was something trivial, not something universally recorded worldwide on the internet. Your credit rating was not inspected by potential employers, nor your urine for drugs. Many were more casual in their behavior. Individuals go nuts on Facebook and we all get to gloat about their craziness, but by and large most people are more careful. They could lose a 9-dollar-an-hour job for stealing a 1.15 bottle of milk.

• Oh wow. I think I went to the same higschool as R5 but it was a few years after him or her. I remember the bathroom fire but I wasn't in highschool yet. I lived near where the cop and his brother disapeared from. My brother partied with the guy who froze to death on the tracks. I didn't know Rob Piest, but it was really freaky that a guy from our town ended up in the crawl. Not highschool related but the house where the infamous Chicago Outfit gangster Antony Spilatro and his brother was murdered was about 5 blocks from my house. I think The Outfit had something to with the D brothers, from R5's post, disapearing too. The Outfit was all over that town back then, still are from what I hear. Just gossip, but I heard when they started pulling down the townhouses off York they started finding bodies burried in the basements that were murder victims of The Outfit. My dad said after the first few they started taking the bodies out at night so no one would know how many there had been. Good old Crooked County.

• Dang OP, you are bad luck! Stay the heel away from me.

• 1. Leukemia, first grade 2. Heart problems 5th grade 3. Locked self in old fridge while playing hide and seek with younger kids, 6th grade 4. Classmate accidentally shot and killed twin brother playing with dad's gun, 6th grade 5. Brain tumor, 7th grade 6. Drowned in crowded hotel swimming pool, 7th grade 7. Played chicken on railroad tracks, 9th grade 8. Skeet shooting accident. Whoops, bye most of head 9. Cousin drowned, 10th grade 10. Best friends brother suicide, 10th grade 11. Two classmates run over by drunken off duty cop who left scene of accident and later claimed he thought he'd hit "garbage cans." Neither could have an open casket wake. No charges to cop. 10th grade 12. Like, 4 more car accident deaths 13. Bunch of drug ODs 14. Girl murdered along with family members by brother, became national story and idiotic book/movie. Is still a famous case today. One year after HS graduation.

• Dwayne Owens shot in the head by accident by Doug Power. I think of him very often. We also had a teacher who was a pilot crash land his plane full of marijuana and he died.

• Class of 1973.So many lovely kids died within a few years of graduation. Accidents, illnesses. Very sad. Lots,of memorial.placks along the hallways. My synagogue used to rent out the school onthe High Holidays for services. I always walked the halls on Yom Kippurr see them, reflect and review the treasured memories of friends who died too young.

• [quote] I've known people who died but it freaks me out when they lose their minds A kid I grew up with on my block (who molested me when I was 6), went crazy when he was 16. Hid next to the house and kicked his mother's head in when she went out to her car. She survived but was totally brain damaged. Very sad. She was a "war bride" from the UK, WWII. Married a nut job and didn't know what she was getting into. The kid went into a psych hospital (they still existed back then). The father took care of the mother, and every few years the hospital would pressure the father to take the son home. They knew the mother was disabled, lived at home with the father and that the kid had tried and nearly succeeded in killing her. But they were closing down the psych hospitals and wanted everybody out. It didn't matter to them if he killed both of his parents. Luckily, my mother worked at the psych hospital and told the father he was to refuse to take the son home and threaten them with lawyers. The parents eventually died and the kid (man), so far as I know, stayed locked up. He had one sibling who married and moved to the UK and never looked back.

• Class of '87. Lots of suicides and car accidents. At the time it was sad but now I find it fucking tragic that these young men, and it was all young men, either found nothing to live for or ended up mashed up in a car crash.

• Sometimes they come back!!!

• R5, the Gacy victim you knew was Rob Piest?

• Seat belts and airbags. When I was in high school, seat belts were the lap belts and never worn. Good times. Until someone rolls a car / truck over and gets thrown out the window, or hits a telephone pole and goes through the windshield.

• There is always a lot of teenagers killed in accidents in this part of the country. More now that they are all using cell phones while driving. And I suspect many of them text as well as talk while driving. Nobody in my particular class died during school years, but in the other classes of the school. Two years after graduation, the first 1972 classmate died from suicidal gunshot. We are 58 this year and still most of the deaths so far have been suicide. Two cancer, one heart attack, several drug/alcohol related liver disease, and eight suicide that I know about. Most of the suicide victims were addicted to alcohol/other drugs.

  Big Fat Queer

• Teenage boys lose their minds behind the wheel of a car. Four high school teens were killed here recently. Traveling in excess of 100 mph on a curving, winding parkway built in the 1930s for sightseers. At 3:30 am on a school night, none of them had a driver's license. The driver had a permit allowing him to drive in daytime, but an adult needs to be in the car with a teen after 9 pm if they have a permit. Parents ad bought the 17 year old a new Impreza. Duh.

• R4, have you ever seen the zombie version of that song?

  http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3Dj1nXKw5VXn8%26feature%3Dyoutube_gdata_player

  Dawn%20O%27daDed

• Damn, R5. One classmate joined the army and died from a car bomb. He was 19. There was no open casket and I can still feel the horror of knowing he got blown up to pieces. I’ll never forget his mother crying when we came to visit her. I promised her I’ll come and visit again but I never did. I don’t think I knew how to deal with it back then. He was a good kid, I wish he hadn’t died.

• Rob Piest was asking for it. Of all Gacy's victims, Piest kept pestering him over and over to go work for him, because he heard that Gacy paid better wages than the drugstore, where he worked. Everyone in the drug store knew he was creepy and the girl that Gacy tried to hire, (he actually hired people legitimately, his victims were pick ups), refused as he was that creepy guy.

• How do you know that, R58?

• Graduated HS in ‘78 Best friend from junior high on, died from AIDS in 1991. We had both just turned 30. Best friend from college died from AIDS (I think - though the family would never admit it since he was married) in 1992. I think about both of them very often - and miss them both still. The sister of one of my little brothers’ best friends killed herself with a rifle when she was a freshman in high school. I used to tutor her when she was a little kid. A freshman I knew pretty well (I was a sophomore) stole cyanide from the science lab and drank it. Died in his dorm room - very messy death. After the police finished their investigation, a frat bro and I were asked to clean up the mess. The kid was gay and came from a very religious home. When he finally realized he was gay, he just couldn’t take it. Sad.

  Painful%20Memories

• Rob Piest was very good looking.

• Less than a week after school let out for summer, one of my classmates died in the worst terrorist attack in history (before 9/11). I believe his mother and sister died with him, his father spared only because he planned to join them in India a few weeks later.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182

• One guy got mowed down by a speedboat while he was swimming at the beach. Two guys and two girls, none were drunk, hit the median barrier on a freeway. The car flew up and hit an overhead sign. It exploded on impact. I knew the guy driving. It was really sad, and event though we weren't best friends, I do think of him fairly often.

• Thinking back to the horror linked in r62, there was very little reaction in the US. In those years, we weren't so easily derailed by events, but also, since it was mostly Indian people and Canadians of Indian descent killed for reasons that most Americans didn't understand, the tragedy received little continuing coverage. When Lockerbie occurred, it was as if it was the first time a plane was blown out of the sky with a concealed bomb. Even in 99, when that Egyptian Air jet crashed off the East Coast, most Americans (esp the media) had little interest. But JFK Jr's crash around the same time preempted national programming for two or three days...

• Rob Piest was beautiful. Pretty heartbreaking.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D3GDnBwvs52o

• There was this guy who hated me and would often spit at me. I couldn't understand his problem with me until it dawned on me years later that he was attracted to me and saw me as rejecting. I used to wish him dead all of the time as he was ruining my otherwise great high school experience. I screamed at him "I hope you die"...and then he did. Head first into a tree on his minibike that very weekend. He saved the world a lot of grief. To this day I know it is for the best. I feel like a great power had intervened, sparing me of his torment. Darwin at work.

• Glad you made it out alive R5!

• I enlisted with a buddy right after graduation. We were in heavy action and he took a round on his gut. Nothing could be done for him and he was dying. He was gonna eat a bullet, but I couldn't let him do that because its a mortal sin,and I wanted him to be with Jesus, so I pumped a slug into his heart.

• My grandad said that battlefield euthanasia with a pistol happened all the time I. WWII. He said the Americans and the British did it, but the germansnwouldnt spare the ammo.