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  • Had two bullies in elementary school. One of them died in a car accident a month after high school graduation. The other went on to have a mildly successful college basketball career which was cut short when he was hit by a car.

    No, I was not driving either car

  • There is not a worst, people can be so many shades of despicable. But if you want a story.
    When I was in high school a good friend of mine and my girlfriend's pretended to be gay and in the closet so that he could get my GF to pretend to be his GF to "make sure his parents wouldn't know". We both wanted to help him out so it was fine.
    In fact he just wanted to be in a relationship with her and figured it was the fastest and easiest way. Even her pretending was not good enough for him and just a starting point.

    He would go on to start a rumor about me that was so vile it got me suspended from school and detained by the police, while I was away he raped the girl he pretended to love and when she freaked out pushed her in front of a car.

    Like all the monsters in the world, they were just a person with sick twisted ideas of what they were owed and no, there isn't and wasn't karma or retribution against him. The world folds up and quietly moves on desperate to look away from the things that are to harsh to stare at for long by those pretending the world to be something better in blind hope that people are inherently good.

  • There's not much closure here because I do not know where any of these people are now, and I don't care to look.

    At school, if you don't count the bullies, probably the kid who thought it was amusing to take rabbits apart after hunting them. I have another story in my head about something awful that happened to a cat which may also have been him, now that I think about it. He had an odd monotone to his voice and a dead look in his eyes, like he was elsewhere or sleeping and something else was running the show. He didn't seem all that terrifying either, which is probably worse.

    There was at least one teacher who I'm pretty sure had far-right leanings, with a couple of glaring red flags, but I didn't notice until I was much older.

    Then, in an echo of that, there was the smug CEO of the company that bought the one I was working for, who came up with the magical slogan "One company, one workforce, one leader". I'm surprised he didn't throw in a "Work sets you free" along with it. (This was in the early '00s, and is almost certainly not known to anyone reading this.)

    But as far as shitty behaviour goes, I can't count myself as completely innocent. There are many things I've done, that I won't go into, where my conscience has since reasserted itself (or ignorance lost, or both) and I cringe pretty much every day. I can only hope the people on the receiving end are doing great and aren't too badly affected by it.

    It's for this reason I'd hope that each of the above, and a lot more people besides, would have their consciences do the same thing.

  • My Grandfather.
    He was a drunk and a a wife beater.
    One night starting at about 10 pm he beat my grandma to the brink of death with anything he could find.
    He broke the walnut coat tree over her head, beat her with the radio, whipped her with his belt, broke her hands, tired her up behind his car and drug her up and down the gravel road, burned her clothes, and left her outside in February and kept dumping water on her trying to wake her up.
    He finally stopped around 5 am when he called my mom because she wouldn't wake up.
    My mom and aunt took her to the hospital and sent the cops after him.
    He tried to say she did it to herself and then charged his story to say that she ran off with "a bunch of n*ggers to do cocaine".
    She was in a coma and was pronounced brain dead 4 days after it happened.

    There were belt marks on her back and stomach and you could clearly read his name from his belt buckle.
    I vividly remember sitting though the court hearings and testifying at 12 years old.

    He went to prison, we had to fight his parole every 5 years to keep him in, because he would have killed all of us for putting him in there, for 20 years.
    In 2020 he died a slow and horrible death in the prison infirmary of Covid, he suffered for weeks and not one of his children or grandchildren went to visit him in his final days.

  • My father physically and mentally abused me to the point that when I talked to friends I thought it was normal to ask how hard their beatings were for a particular infraction. My best friend reported him to CPS without telling me and he stopped putting his hands on me around age 14 (my mother would yell at him and tell him she didn’t want to go to jail, or him). I thought parents who didn’t beat their children were the most liberal parents imaginable. At my age 20 when I was home visiting from college, he nearly killed me and my mother via trying to flip the car into a ditch on the passenger side where we were both sitting because she let my younger sister drive his car on a joyride. I got into financial troubles after college and had to move back in with him. At my age 25 he got plastered drunk one night and voilently raped my mother in our trailer. Next morning I confronted him about it when he was stone cold sober and he grabbed me by neck and got in my face telling me to stay out of it or else he’d kill me. When I moved out, I didn’t feel “free” until I was in my mid 20s.

    He’s about to inherit half my grandmother’s 700K house. He’s openly said he’s taking my mother’s inheritance too.

    I have been told I’ll inherit 50K from my grandmother, but that’s not guaranteed because if my grandmother finds out I’m gay I most certainly get nothing.

    • People claim they have no interesting stories and then will tell me tales of happy childhoods where they had parents support and love them and they went on road trips and had the joy of just being a child and I can't help but think of that fantasy world they got to live for all those years as something beautiful and beyond what human experience for most of our history was even capable of.

      People toss off the casual miracles cause they lack shine but having a parent that didn't rape and abuse is quite an interesting story to me.

      I'm sorry, be strong and outlive the fuckers so that we can confirm that they die.

      • Don't know why but these comments hit hard. Showed me my privilege, I suppose. My parents were distant, emotionally absent, manipulative, and controlling. And, of course, they fucked me up*. I've had more than one (ex) girlfriend accuse me of being an emotional cripple. But I was never afraid of my parents physically. And now they're both passed, so it's up to me to try not to fuck up my kids.

        This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin

        They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
        They may not mean to, but they do.
        They fill you with the faults they had
        And add some extra, just for you.

        But they were fucked up in their turn
        By fools in old-style hats and coats,
        Who half the time were soppy-stern
        And half at one another's throats.

        Man hands on misery to man.
        It deepens like a coastal shelf.
        Get out as early as you can,
        And don't have any kids yourself.

  • I found out many years after high school that a douche I had to stop from bullying my little brother died in a car wreck at age 20.

    That was fun to hear.

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