A Great Story From Outside the Lines

Read this yesterday ... outstanding, heartbreaking stuff.

Had to take a few deep breaths to get through the whole thing.

 

Jesus. As if the three kids from the same school weren't enough, the third kids gf gets killed and then her brother dies after driving home after hearing the news. It's like a bad horror movie.

 

When I was in high school, two of my classmates were killed by two other classmates. One was a random accident and one was murder. This was in the mid-80s. Our school didn't bring in any counselors, there was no great outpouring of emotion. We just sort of went on. At the time, it didn't seem strange at all. Looking back, it was totally fucked up that our school did nothing to support us.

This story was completely heartbreaking. Life isn't fair, indeed.

 

Kinda like they just swept everything under the rug?

 

Not really. It was more like -- well, it's over with, let's just move on. The murder happened first. A guy murdered a girl and left her body in the woods. She was presumed missing for about 9 months. He just came to school like normal. It was before cable news and my friends and I now feel certain it was the kind of story that one of the shows would have picked up on. Back then, though, the local paper wrote a couple of stories, but that was it. Her body was eventually found in June, just before school let out for summer and I don't remember how they figured out who the killer was. I think he may have been arrested over the summer, so school officials didn't really have to deal with it.

The other death was a random accident. One guy was crossing a dark street, right at a bend and just randomly, a classmate hit him. It was the pedestrian's fault. The driver wasn't drunk, wasn't speeding. He just came around a bend and someone was in the road and it was too late to stop. It happened on a Saturday night, right near my house, so I was one of the first people to hear about it. We were seniors and they let the senior class miss a few hours of school to go to the funeral, but beyond that it was "OK - let's move on." It wasn't so much a sweeping under the rug as much as I think they just didn't know what to do, so they did nothing.

 

dissenting opinion here:

without a doubt, it is well written. weinreb is good with words.

but it's not a sports story. it's a small town story. not sure why small towns and especially small town high schools are so compelling to big city sportswriters - but they seem to love to wallow in the quaint 'atmospherics'. it's verging on cliche. the 24-hour cafe off the interstate highway, the pickup trucks, booster clubs, simple but earnest townfolk, etc.

this was barely a story. the three deaths weren't connected - they were coincidental.
the narrative did not have a payoff.

 

Perhaps sportswriters have a connection to small towns and their culture because most of us have spent at least a few years, or in some cases, decades, in far-flung communities as we tried to move up the ladder to bigger papers. Some sportswriters grew up in those sorts of towns, too.

It's also easier to get the parents to talk about their good kid needlessly lost than their kid who gunned someone down or robbed them with violent force for no good reason at all.

I don't enjoy writing either type of story. I always feel like an intruder into someone else's pain. No matter how many weeks/months a writer spends in a community, the real question is how many will they spend their after publication? It's the nature of our job, but it makes me feel like an asshole.

As for this story, I enjoyed it, although I thought the Wal-Mart/I-5/small-town elements were tired and cliched. Welcome to America...tell me that the sky is blue, already, and get on with the people who are driving the story.

 

Tell that to the people of Willows. And though this is barely a <i>sports</i> story, it's a wonderful story about the struggles that a small town has to go through sometimes. We live in a cynical world where tragic deaths barely impact us anymore (especially as journalists), so for me, it's always good to be told a story that makes it real again. It helps me appreciate the people around me a little more when I read stories like this. So for that, I'm glad they're being told by whoever has the ability to do so.

 

what death isn't tragic?

stick a pin into a map.

anywhere it lands you will find 'tragic' death.

your town, my town, the neighboring town, any big city, any rural expanse.

a story needs more than just death and grieving.

 

Funny response Bullwinkle, but I'm in Henry's camp on this story.

Obviously a horrible time for that town, but the writing didn't knock my socks off. The writer went to the small town well too many times in this story, and for as awful as the subject matter was, I never felt the raw emotions this story should have brought out.

 

I just do not understand the disdain with this story. At all.