What was 'The Incident' at your school?

I have never written on here before but I thought I could contribute! I went to a highschool that was rife with so many bizarre incidents and scandals that it kind of sounds made up.

The first incident I can remember happened years before I was in highschool. By the time I enrolled it had become local lore, and was a widely circulated story with varying levels of credibility and factuality (depending on who told you talked to). Basically, the gist was, two kids who went to our school went crazy and decided to shoot up a Buddhist Temple. Sometimes I heard they robbed it and no one got hurt, and sometimes I heard it was a massacre. Kids sort of tossed this story around the way you would a ghost story; it was mostly told to get a rise out of someone, and the actual details were murky. I researched it in the fall of my freshman year, and I found out that the two students were responsible for the deaths of nine people. At least one of them (who, it was later found was involved in a second brutal murder months after the Temple Massacre) made a full confession. In it he detailed their plan, which included robbery, assault and “leaving no witnesses”. They were armed with a shotgun and a rifle, and they took the lives of everyone in the temple that day. It is considered the deadliest shooting in our state’s history and the anniversary of that event is still observed here almost two decades later. Thankfully, both of them got several consecutive life sentences, and will live out the rest of their days in prison.

Some years later, the school was in headlines yet again, this time because weapons had mysteriously appeared stashed on the rooftop of one of the buildings on campus. They were traced back to a home in a nearby suburb, but that home had been burglarized several weeks prior, and they couldn’t figure out who stole the guns and why on earth they chose to stash them on the roof. To my knowledge, no one was ever caught for this one.

Then, on a lighter note (before it gets shitty again) when I was a freshman, our school got shut down for one week because of a mercury spill and it was the best thing ever. We apparently made history again, because this was the labeled as the worst mercury spill to ever occur in our state. This, I’m sure, was due to the fact that EVERYBODY was stoked and all over it and no one was the least bit concerned about being poisoned. (Myself included). I wasn’t in the class at the time, but my friends were, which thoroughly bummed me out (until kids directly linked to the incident started getting thrown in ISS.) There was a substitute teacher working who literally did not give a shit what anyone did, and she had her back turned while two kids spotted a water bottle filled with a metallic liquid. Because they were teenagers and because mercury is tight as shit, they poured it out to see what would happen. In a domino effect, they poured it on the floor, which then got picked up by someone else, who then tracked it somewhere else, which then exposed it to numerous people….all in all, 500 people or something were exposed to it and screened for mercury. I remember this happened right before Valentine’s Day and I was having a sleepover with my friends, and we all got a call the next morning saying the school had been shut down. When we told my friend’s mom, she thought we were lying to her and she drove us all the way to school, where we were greeted by a shit ton of police cars, and fire trucks, and men in hazmat suits blocking the entrances. The school reopened one week later and we had to go through some serious security at every entrance of the school for like a month after. None of us understood the severity of the contamination, and we partied like we were on vacation that whole week. The teacher (who was actually really cool) got fired, obviously, and I think the school district spent something like 1 million on the whole scandal. That amount of money, from an already shrinking budget, is probably a big reason everything at our school was shit for the next 4 years. Literally the next year, a female student accused one of our teachers of rape. This was a very interesting period of time to be a student or teacher at my school, because it was all anyone ever talked about. Looking back, the whole situation sheds a lot of light into human behavior and I have not forgotten the way it changed my perspective on people. The accused teacher was a strange man. He was tall in a way that made you feel he was towering over you. He had a naturally protruding brow that sort of weighed his face down, that put him in a perpetual scowl. He also had these beady eyes that never held direct contact. He had a weird way about him. He walked quickly and didn’t interact with students in the halls. So everyone said things like, “I always knew he was weird.” And the girls would say, “He’s always creeped me out, he’s a fucking pervert.” It must be mentioned that the alleged victim was a special education student, so naturally, he was seen as a monster, and rightfully so. Only….he wasn’t. Because he didn’t do it. Upon the principal catching wind of the rumor of his alleged sexual assault, the teacher was immediately suspended without pay and investigations were underway. There were a lot of group talks during that time about sexual assault and how to conduct ourselves appropriately on campus. The girl said she was called out of class and then the teacher assaulted her. This teacher was the director of special education and it was a huge scandal. He plead not guilty. Upon further investigation it turned out that this particular young lady had a history of lying, specifically about sexual misconduct, in her past. She had (If I remember correctly) left a different school because of a similar situation, and there was no substantial evidence to suggest anything had taken place. When the dust had settled, everyone felt really bad for the teacher. I had heard that although he was offered his job back, he didn’t take it, cause his reputation had undergone some pretty irreversible damage. He had a wife and young child at the time, but she left him during the investigation. He ended up quitting teaching and years later, after we had all long graduated, one of my friends who moved to another state randomly saw him in a grocery store. I don’t think he even goes by the same name. I think sometimes about how quickly we all were to believe he was guilty. I will never question sexual assault, and I am truly sad that people treat it carelessly and make false accusations that undermine genuine cases. However, I’m very aware of how irrevocably his life was changed, and it makes me sad to think that he lost everything due to a lie that grew larger than life.

Add to these things the massive fights that happened literally every week, the orgy that occurred in the girls restroom my sophomore year, a gross coach/teacher who was supposedly banging some of the students on his teams (I would NOT be surprised if he was, that guy was a real loser) and you’ve got a school that sounds a lot more interesting to attend than it actually was.

TLDR; mass murderer, weapons stash, mercury spill, sexual assault scandal, orgy, and most likely a pervy coach

/r/AskReddit Thread