I was seventeen when I killed a man. He broke into our house on a night when it was just me and my little sister, and I heard him kick in a window. I grabbed my father’s gun, ran upstairs, locked us in her room, and called the police. He heard me moving through the house, knew exactly where I was.
He started taunting us, saying he’d kill us both if we didn’t stay quiet. Then he started throwing himself at the door. I was screaming at the dispatcher that I had a gun and would shoot. My sister was crying, terrified, not understanding what was happening.
The lock broke, and I asked the dispatcher if I could shoot. Then I did. He died. I’m a killer.
Fifteen years later, I’m married, I have a good job, and I still don’t think of myself as a regular person. It’s hard to live in normal society when you’ve taken a life, even when it was justified. My father had his own version of that weight. When I was around fourteen, he picked me up from school in a conversion van.
A small car pulled out of a parking lot not thirty feet ahead of us. My dad hit the brakes, but there was no time. He plowed into the car. The driver was ninety-one years old, a man who probably shouldn’t have been behind the wheel in the first place.
He died in the hospital a week later from his injuries. No charges were brought. It wasn’t my father’s fault, but after the man passed, it got to him badly. He still won’t talk about it, over fifteen years later.
My mother said it haunted him for a long time. My first job out of school was as a medical tech in an emergency room. One day I had to take a patient to the CT scanner, an older man from another unit. We chatted a little on the way to the door, but mostly he was quiet.
I warned him there would be a bump, the automatic door had a small threshold. I pushed the stretcher over it, it went bump, and the old guy made a small sound. I looked around the edge of the bed. He looked at me but didn’t say anything.
I didn’t think twice. I rolled him down the hall to CT, and the tech there took one look at him and called a code. We worked on him, but he died. What happened was he had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, and the bump over that threshold had burst it.
He bled out. It would have happened to whoever pushed him over that bump, but it was me. I felt terrible, especially hearing his family wailing down the hall. My co-workers, in their morbid humor, made me clean his body and take him to the morgue.
So technically, my actions directly resulted in a man’s death. I have killed someone. A friend of mine was driving on the interstate last year when a woman jumped out in front of his truck. He hit her hard.
He pulled over, got out, saw she was breathing but fading fast. He knows CPR but was in such shock he couldn’t do it. She was dead by the time the cops arrived. He later found out her little boy had died a couple of weeks before, and she was severely depressed, trying to kill herself.
It doesn’t seem to affect him, though. He always says she would have found another way to kill herself if he hadn’t hit her. I think that’s how he copes. I was seventeen, driving home from school in winter.
My father was a Marine and insisted I carry a handgun under the seat, illegal as it was. I kept it hidden and told no one. The highway was dark by five, and I saw a pile of garbage in the middle of the road. I slowed down to go around it when it moved.
A man stood up and dove in front of my car. I was going only about fifteen miles an hour, so it probably hurt him, but he wasn’t dead. I stopped and grabbed the gun just in case. He lay there still, then got up and crawled toward me.
I walked over and asked if he was okay. He was speaking Russian or German, something I couldn’t understand. Then he got up and drew a big buck knife. He was foaming at the mouth.
Drugs. He started toward me, and I drew my weapon. I told him I was armed and would shoot if he didn’t stop. He lunged, I stepped back, and fired twice.
One hit his shoulder, one his chest. He went down. I called the police, told them it was self-defense, and that the attacker needed medical attention. Then I called my dad.
Twenty minutes later, the cops arrested me. My lawyer helped, we went through trial, and eventually the charges were dropped. I’m still anxious about safety, still wary of sketchy situations. I went through therapy, referred by my wife, and I’m feeling better.
But I still think about the guy. He just needed help. It was me or him. I’m not sure this counts, but I had a friend in high school who came up to me, asking for advice about a girl he got pregnant.
I didn’t know what to say. I just told him that sucks, and I guess try to prepare to be a father. He didn’t like my advice, or lack of it. The next day, he killed himself.
I may have been the last person he ever talked to. I know now I wasn’t responsible, but it haunted me for years, the thought that maybe if I’d been less dismissive, more helpful, he’d still be alive. It turned out the kid wasn’t even his, which only made things worse. I’ve forgiven myself since, but I’ll never forget.
In college, I had afternoon and evening classes all semester, so I got up around eleven most days. One spring evening, I was working in the computer lab until they closed at eleven-thirty. I was driving home on a divided highway when a drunk driver in front of me hit a drunk pedestrian who was illegally crossing the road. Then I ran over the pedestrian too.
Police, fire, and ambulance were there quickly, all focused on the pedestrian. I waited by the side of the road until they were done, then presented myself to the first cop who was looking for witnesses. I had to argue with him to believe I’d also struck the guy. It wasn’t until they found my cracked oil pan that they believed me.
I gave a brief statement, they drew my blood at the hospital, which I had to pay for. Then I drove home, dropped my car at the mechanic, and walked home around four-thirty in the morning. I left a note for my mom asking her to wake me at six-thirty so she could drop me off at college, since my car was in the shop. I thought about skipping, but we had a midterm that day.
The pedestrian died. I can’t remember which of us hit him harder. The cops told me one had a blood alcohol of twenty-eight, the other thirty-five. I was totally sober, and I remember everything, particularly sitting on the side of the road watching them work on him, waiting for them to have time to deal with me.
When you hit someone with your car, depending on height, they roll over the hood and off to the side. The first driver didn’t do the fatal damage. The injuries that killed him were all from me. I was the person least responsible for the accident and most responsible for his death.
I flunked the midterm. All I could hear was the thunk-thunk of my wheels going over his body. I turned in a blank paper, went to the student center, played pinball for two hours, then went to student health for therapy. It didn’t work.
I was kind of suicidal for a while. For others who hit people where they roll off and survive, it’s bad enough. For me, it was as bad as you think. These days I’m doing better, but there are scars.
I’m a vegetarian not because I like vegetables but because I have problems with death. I get tense when bags or papers blow across the road. I hate those bits in shows where someone gets hit by a car. One time my brother and I were at home waiting for our mom to come back with groceries.
We heard a loud knocking at the porch door and figured it was her with her hands full. I looked out and saw a hand beating at the small glass panes, breaking them. I was about twelve and scared. My brother called the cops and our mom, told her to stay away.
We stayed inside while this person yelled and beat the glass. It turned out a man was walking down the sidewalk, felt a seizure coming on, and tried to knock on our door for help. The seizure hit, and he died, alone. He’d beaten his head against our steps.
We never saw his body or face through the door, just his hand. I never learned his name. It didn’t bother me as a child, but now I think about it more than I ever thought I would. We could have opened the door.
Maybe we could have helped. When I was fourteen, I was on a bus headed to church camp. We were about an hour out of town when a car making a left turn pulled out in front of us. The bus ran completely over it.
It wasn’t the driver’s fault; the man in the car thought he had enough time. We sat on the bus for hours while they tried to extract the people inside. A father and his son, both dead. I wasn’t driving, but it hit me hard.
The worst part came a week later when we found out the church had never booked our cabins. They’d booked them for the following weekend. We killed two people during a trip that never should have left the parking lot. I think that’s about when I decided church wasn’t for me.
When I was eighteen, I was in a car accident. I struck a vehicle, a Jeep, and it flipped. The driver died. For three years I went through horrible depression.
The scene was something out of a horror film. I lost my mind that day. Suicidal thoughts, massive amounts of opiates, anything to numb the pain. I lost contact with all my friends.
It was considered a no-fault accident, and I heard the driver was intoxicated, so there were no legal issues. Today I’m clean and rarely think about it, but it was a nightmare I’d wish on no one. It’s like living in a shell of the person you were, all your thoughts cloudy with what you’d do to change things. You want death just to balance what you’ve done.
It broke me, but I rebuilt myself after nearly a decade. My dad’s cousin was as close to an uncle as my sister and I had, since we have a really small family. He accidentally killed his sister with a baseball when he was eight or nine. She was twelve, and he hit her in the temple.
She died instantly. No one talks about it, so I’ve never heard the details. I’ve only seen the aftermath. His mother developed a stutter and became nearly unable to leave the house.
Her son, now in his late fifties, wasn’t allowed anywhere but school. His father drove him everywhere. He never went to college, never moved away, never dated, never made social connections. As far as I can tell, he still lives in his parents’ house, and they both passed away a few years back.
His sister’s bedroom is exactly the way it was the day she died. Bed unmade, toys on the floor, laundry in the hamper. Going to their house for the holidays was horrifying. There’s essentially a shrine to a little girl who died in the sixties, and I was never allowed to touch any of her toys.
A guy I knew in high school went hunting with his dad when he was about fifteen. I don’t know the exact details, but it involved his gun accidentally going off and killing his father. He was absent from school for weeks, and when he came back, he was a visibly different person. I don’t know how he’s doing now.
My best friend gave me a detailed suicide plan. I didn’t take him seriously. He killed himself the next day. I will never forgive myself.
I don’t like talking about it because people say it wasn’t my fault, but they weren’t there. I know it was an accident, but when I think about it in any depth, it feels like a heart attack. I ruined his parents’ lives. I mostly avoid thinking about it beyond the surface, because it’s easier that way.
I’ll never be at peace with it, and I deserve to feel guilty until the day I die. But I still have to wake up every morning. Another car story. It was my bachelor party.
The guy organizing it was slow and forgot to invite people until the last minute. We got four guys, two girls, and a few hundred donated dollars to head out to a strip club. The girls were fun and cool with whatever, and the designated driver stayed sober. We had a good time and left around one in the morning.
I passed out in the backseat with my girl. We were on the interstate when we woke up to a huge bump. The guys in the front were yelling about hitting a person versus a deer. We pulled over.
Radiator steaming, flat tire. Confused and drunk, we ran up the road to see a bloody carcass. Pants, a jacket, boots knocked off, no head. The cops came and never blamed or accused us, just standard questioning.
We weren’t the first car to hit him. There was a Saturn with a broken windshield that hit him first, but his scalp and eyeball were on my friend’s oil pan. I have a picture somewhere. I was disgusted he took it.
They blocked off the interstate, and we paced and talked to cops until the sun came up. At the end, they were getting in their cars, the friend’s car on a tow truck. I went up and asked what about us. They were confused.
We were on the side of the interstate between Baltimore and D. C. without a car. They wouldn’t give us a ride except to the police station, where we got a cab to a car rental place.
We got home late that morning. I spent more time talking to insurance companies and cops afterward but was never threatened with charges. The next Monday I went back to work and heard guys from a different vendor talking about some guys who killed a man after a strip club. The news had made it from one of us to people in Texas, who told more people at another company, who fed it back to people in our city.
Crazy. I felt bad for the man’s family but not guilty, since I wasn’t really involved in causing it. I found out from the insurance company he had four kids. No one knew why he was trying to walk across the interstate in the middle of the night.
When I was younger, I lived in a very rough neighborhood. It was normal to have random people knock on your door at two in the morning, mostly homeless folks. One night we were all asleep, around one or two, and I was on my laptop when someone started banging on the door. I figured it was just a drunk guy and thought nothing of it.
Then I heard him shout, “Help, please help me, they’re going to kill me. ” A chill shot up my spine, and I froze. I heard my mom and sister get up. We stood there, not knowing what to do.
We obviously weren’t going to open the door, given all the possible dangers, so we just listened to him shout. Then he ran off. We looked out the windows, but no one was there. We all went back to bed and didn’t talk about it.
I know we didn’t kill him, but it’s always stayed at the back of my mind that maybe we could have helped him. It comes up now and then, but it never really affected us.