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You've probably met someone who has killed a person

Not just uncaught murderers, there are a lot of people who have killed without legally being considered murderers.

People who killed people in accidents such as driving accidents or hunting accidents

People who killed in self defense

Soldiers who killed enemy soldiers

Executioners

Police officers who have killed on duty

Doctors and nurses who have made mistakes that accidentally killed patients

173 comments
  • I had a co-worker at one of my first big boy jobs working for a hospital, and this guy was weird as weird could be.

    He was an older man, probably in his late fifties at the earliest, and we worked in the IT department, and he would blast Avril Lavigne music non-stop.

    To make this worse, he wouldn't stop even if you asked him to, and he didn't talk to people, he was rough, he was mean, he was grouchy, he was unapproachable.

    About a year after I started, he disappeared one day.

    I asked my co-workers about him, and the truth finally came out.

    Apparently, about six months before I started, he had gotten into a car accident and killed two people in the car accident, and he was found at fault for drinking and driving.

    The reason he was not in jail at the time was his trial was still going through, and the weekend before he disappeared, his trial commenced, he was found guilty and he was sentenced.

    And, yeah, as far as I am aware, he is still in jail today if he's still alive.

    About a year later, one of my other co-workers was murdered by his wife and their pastor, and it became nationwide news.

  • I know a train operator. They are sometimes involuntary involved in other peoples suicide.

    • That has to be one of the worst choices if you must go. I get that we don’t think straight in those moments of our life, but it’s such a horrible thing to force on someone and their conscience…

      Not just trains, but all the instances where someone entirely unrelated will be dragged into something so heavy, like truck drivers, too. Hard to live with, can really ruin lives.

      Another thing I don’t like is when others that aren’t trained for it like the paramedics or police, have to see the outcome and fallout, such as jumping off a building into a busy street, even at night when nobody’s there just now, but will be. Or hanging yourself from your balcony in an apartment complex.

      It fucks up someone to see that, and I have to believe everyone could make the responsible choice of doing it in private or in a way that affects least amount of unrelated people possible. Like going with the helium/nitrogen bag, hanging within the bounds of one’s privacy, if shooting is the way to go, do it perhaps in the woods, somewhere peaceful and remote, and call the paramedics so they’ll be there before any innocent walkers-by, etc.

      It’s bad that anyone has to be involved, but at least the professionals have the training to deal with that somehow, even if it will ultimately fuck them up too at least somehow. At least it’s a conscious choice for them to put themselves in the position that they might have to see shit like that. Same for police.

      I would strongly encourage messless ways to go, too, because I think the psychological impact of a peacful-seeming exit without blood or injuries has to be the least damaging. It’s never going to be clean and harmless to others, but an exit bag would do a lot of good for everyone eventually involved in the situation.

      But I also get that a lot of people in that position may harbor some general hatred and bitterness towards others, which is horrible and I have to think entirely avoidable if the society did its job, so they might even choose to go as publicly and messily as possible just to make a point or something.

      But the others have to live with that shit. They keep going. You don’t. The least we can do is try to minimize the trauma and impact we necessarily inflict on others when we do go. We get the peace. We get away. Those others, not so much.

      I don’t know how this would be taught other than boldly and empathetically talking about it in school, to make the point repeatedly, like we do with sex education for example. And health education too. We really should talk about these things, so when the time comes one has to leave, the spine reaction would be to do it as kindly as possible, to be considerate in the choice of manner.

      • I get that we don’t think straight in those moments of our life, but it’s such a horrible thing to force on someone and their conscience…

        I'm a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. When someone is actively suicidal, they indeed are not thinking straight. They are (usually) just looking for a way to escape their pain. Actively experiencing pain (be it physical or mental) reduces our capacity for empathy - that is, to consider how our actions will impact others.

        I have had countless patients tell me their method/plan for suicide was to jump in front of traffic, jump from an overpass, lay on a road, lay on train tracks, etc... and none of them are ever, in those moments, thinking about how it will effect other people. Not because they wouldn't care, but because they are simply unable to while in that state of mind.

        I've had some who, once they were feeling better, shared about how they eventually realized how it would have impacted the driver of the vehicle (or the person who would find their body if it was by another method). But that usually only happens once they're no longer actively wanting to die.

        I've also had several patients who were the person to find a loved one post-suicide. It messed them up.

      • but at least the professionals have the training to deal with that somehow

        Ha. You want to know the training you get for dealing with death? It's a couple of sentences uttered by an instructor when some bozo in the class has more curiosity than thought and asks about the 'yep, he's dead' policy. Most of the time you'll have one of a pair who has done it before, and they just tell the other one what to do (like putting on the electrodes or looking around the room to see what else has been done). That's the whole of it, adding in the jokes that will be told and the mild amusement of watching the other's reaction when you grab a coke out of the dead dude's fridge (I didn't, but the more experienced one had when he was stuck at a house for six hours).

      • Once you get into the deep despair, the rationality disappears. It's easy to logic "just do it without bothering others", but the reality is that once you're killing yourself, things like that don't matter much anymore. Then the logic can warp to "it's still better for everyone if I'm dead" or just "I have to die", or something like that. I don't really want to say the edgy thing, but I guess it is one of those things you can't fully understand unless you've been there.

        Also it's really difficult to kill yourself effectively in a non-messy way, unless you have access to some proper drugs. My personal choice is hanging by cutting off your blood circulation, since it is very effective and you can do it without others seeing. Someone is always going to find the corpse (unless you manage to disappear in the wilderness for long enough, but then just disappearing is super traumatizing as well for the people looking for you), but in the best case scenario they'll just find you calmly in a sitting position and even though that's traumatizing as well, it's not brains splattered on the wall.

        Killing yourself is always horrifying to others, there's just no helping it. I went so far I took selfies smiling seconds before just to make sure people left behind knew I was happy doing it, because that was the only solace I could give others in that moment

      • Got news for you, medics and cops ain't trained for dealing with dead people. The cops I worked around as a medic were some of the most squeamish people at messy scenes.

        Nor are you trained to climb up out of a drainage ditch and explain to a Mother that her 13 year old son is dead down there, pinned under a 4-wheeler, and not me or god can fix it. (A tee shirt I got) Or a family about why their son and brother is hanging 30 feet up in the air by a rope. (Another tee shirt I got)

        I got a closet with maybe a tiny bit more of my share of tee shirts. But I sure as hell wasn't trained for any of them.

    • I don't think anyone would say a train operator killed a person. I'd go as far as to say the operator is about as responsible as the passengers.

  • I work in healthcare, I've removed... so many people from life support. I often wonder if that's, not the same, but...

  • When I was 18/19 in college, I met a guy through my brother's work that was in his mid 40's. We hung out with him and his girlfriend a lot and he was pretty good friends with my brother. He even met my mom and family, helped her with some construction projects she needed done (dad died when I was 15, so she didn't have that extra help), and was invited to her wedding to my step dad.

    Now we knew that this guy was an ex-con (the restaurant my brother worked at hired a lot of ex-cons), but we never really judged or pried into what happened. Honestly, this guy was always just chill, giving, funny, helpful, and respectful. I never got creeped out by him, and i never felt like he was inappropriate with me. We found out through a mutual friend later that this guy used to get paid to bleach the bodies of girls/women that had been raped and killed by others. To this mutual friend's knowledge, our friend hadn't actually done any raping/killing, but I was really struggling to feel much comfort in the fact that he "only" helped guys get away with it. Especially because I was a young, petite college girl at the time.

    Anyways, I dont directly know of anybody ive met that has killed someone, but the fact that I know of somebody that did this horrible thing makes me think that you're correct.

  • As far as i know, i have met only one person like this.

    A guy i knew in "highschool" (kinda equilevant) killed his friend a few years later while both were drunk and had just come out of sauna. He thought that his girlfriend had cheated on him with the other guy and woops, axe to the back.

  • I met the guy who killed my best friend. At her funeral. He was her boyfriend. He got her addicted to drugs. Technically she killed herself by OD-ing, but had he never got her addicted she’d still be alive today. I couldn’t face him. He tried to talk to be and just walked away.

  • Yes, but I haven't seen him since he killed two people, partially because he's been in prison for the last ~28 years.

  • Yeah, my teacher, killed one of his students, her grandma and grandpa (only one of them, one was wounded).

  • Used to work with the criminally insane. I've also met a LOT of pedophiles. Not many because they actually were crazy but because they were trying to get declared as such to not get fucked up in prison. Most of them aren't even actually attracted to children they just wanna victimize someone and children are smaller / weaker and less able to advocate for themselves. The one thing pretty much all of them have in common is a pitiful combination of sadism and cowardice.

173 comments