6.6k comments, so this will probably get buried, but it was incredibly tragic IMO.

There was a kid named Josh, who was an extreme extrovert. He was kind of a flamboyant gay kid who wore dark makeup and was super bubbly. I remember one day he went around during lunch leaving black kiss marks on anyone who he remotely knew. Well, it turns out he was also very depressed, and ended up hanging himself.

This led to a huge outpouring of support from the school, and the city in general. There was such an outcry that it even made the paper, despite their policy against publicizing suicides. It became a pretty big anti-bullying, pro-equality movement.

At our school, the GSA organized a community garden to be built outside the cafeteria in his honor. It was in the shape of a peace sign ☮. It was going well, and there was great support when another tragedy struck.

One of the main contributors, a guy named Jesse, died in a car accident on the way home from school when taking a turn to fast. He was a smart guy, very similar to Aaron Schwartz. He believed technology could be used to make a positive change on the world. He also hosted the proxy our whole school used to bypass the school firewall.

So now the garden was in honor of two instead of one. Purple for Josh, yellow for Jesse.

I think it would have been my senior year by then. The garden was coming along. Rocks made up the peace sign, and there were picnic tables painted with memories of the two deceased. Suddenly there was news of another car accident. This time the car had drifted off a back farm road and slammed into a tree, killing a girl named Hannah. She was a friend of mine, and one of my best friend's Ex. Coincidentally, she had also been the one primarily leading the community garden effort due to her close friendship with Josh and Jesse.

I'm not really sure how to end this story. I sort of stopped being involved with the garden effort when I went to college, and I don't really talk to anyone involved anymore, but I think about it from time to time. Three wonderful friends dying from separate causes within two years of high school was quite the tragedy.