I can now say that I have/do.
After calling my boss to let him know I was working on a scheduled day off, he asked if I heard about what happened with this guy we both know. Thinking he might have been in serious car accident, I learned that he was arrested for beating his ex GF to death.
It was a sobering reminder of what some people are capable of doing. People who you thought would never do anything like that.
Yes, actually. In the earlier parts of my career, I was a floating clerical temp for Tucson Unified School District. I got a long-term assignment to a middle school on the south side of the city, to be their attendance clerk while they looked for a permanent candidate.
It was a depressing job in many ways, because there were so many kids whose parents neither knew nor cared where they were or what they were doing. I remember one girl who dropped out because she was pregnant . . . for the third time. In middle school.
One of my duties was to drop students from the rolls after they racked up a certain number of unexplained absences, and after I had exhausted all attempts to get an explanation from the parents. Right before Christmas break that year, I dropped a girl I'll call GC from the rolls because she had missed almost two weeks of school, without a word from her or her parents as to why. We finally got hold of her mother and asked why she wasn't in school, and her answer was, "How the fuck I know where she is?"
Over the Christmas break, I was watching TV, and the top news story was that GC - who was 14 - had been arrested and was being charged for murder (which explains why she hadn't been in school). Seems she'd been walking late at night down a street known for its hookers, and had let a guy pick her up and drive her out in the desert for sex, then pulled a gun to rob him and shot him in the back as he tried to run away. After that, she stole his truck, went and picked up her best friends, and went joyriding until they crashed the truck.
She was released after serving 20 years.
