Who died at your high school?

A very popular junior, let's call him Brad. Brad was the life of the party and everyone's friend. He was at the beach with several friends, including a girl that lived down the street from me, let's call her Kate. Suddenly, no one could find Brad or Kate. They had been swept out by a rip-tide and Brad went under. Kate was just about to go under, but a surfer grabbed her and paddled back to shore. He dropped her on the beach and headed back out to find Brad. Brad's body was found a few hours later when he washed back to shore. No one caught the surfer's name, or got the chance to thank him, he just wandered off in the confusion, but thank you for saving Kate.

I went to Brad's funeral to help Kate emotionally, although I didn't really know Brad. Every fucking person in the school was crammed into this little church, there must have been 2,000 of us in there, standing room only. The funeral was easily the saddest fucking thing I've ever witnessed, especially when Brad's mom came in screaming "OH GOD, GOD IS TAKING MY BABY AWAY!"

Now the fucked up part. Brad was black, Kate was white. Kate wasn't dating Brad, but her dad and step mom didn't care. They were racist enough to pull her out of that school the next year because she had been hanging out with "those types of people," and they completely blamed the situation of Brad drowning (and Kate almost drowning) on the fact that Brad was black. They put her in a private school where there were only 5 black students out of over 1,000, and everyone was just as racist as her dad.

Oh, also a girl that I had known for years (and had dated a good friend of mine in elementary / middle school) was kidnapped, (supposedly) raped, and murdered by some redneck guy in his 40s. He was caught immediately and I'm pretty sure he's in prison for life. This happened when we were juniors. Everyone seems to gloss over that one for some reason, and I'm shocked to shit that no one ever talked about her again after the announcement, but then again I don't know if her death was even noticed by anyone at the school except me. I think I was the only one who even knew her name when they announced it over the intercom, and even then I hadn't spoken to her in years.

/r/AskReddit Thread