I was just surfing the web a bit ago when I decided to visit stltoday.com, the website for St. Louis' main paper, the Post-Dispatch. On the home page, near the top, there was an article about a senior from my alma mater who raped & killed a junior girl who also went there (story
here). I've heard stories of stuff like that happening to my peers, just not so close to my home. I mean, my sophomore year, a girl in my class from the actual city of St. Louis (she was part of the voluntary deseg program) was raped & murdered by a stranger while out on a date with her boyfriend (who had been rendered helpless in his car's trunk by her attacker). I'm not trying to stereotype here, but that's something you hear about slightly more frequently in the city, rather than out in our little sheltered suburb. And to add insult to injury (for the family), this girl was the younger sister of a guy who died in a car crash my senior year (he was a year younger than me, and so, like his sister, was also a junior at the time of his death). So even though I didn't know any of these people I've mentioned, it still hits you pretty close when you think you could've seen 'em at any given time (the rapist would've been a freshman my senior year).