Note: It's for drug possession, not anything super bad.
13 years ago, my now former best friend tried to first con me out of money and then did it to my mom instead because my daughter had just been born (which he knew) and money was tight. I always knew he had addiction issues, but I never thought he would actually stoop that low.
Today, my wife showed me that there was a public database where you could search Indiana court cases, so out of curiosity, I typed in his name.
21 court cases, mostly drug, vehicle and fraud offenses in the county where we grew up, went to college in, and which he eventually moved back to, stretching back to 1999! Note he didn’t even live there for 10 years!
He’s currently in prison until December because he was found in possession of methamphetamine. And it was not his first time in prison or the first time he had meth on him. He did drugs when we were in college, but the most serious one was cocaine and that was very occasional. I knew he had a drinking problem, and even that he was abusing prescription medication (he offered me Vicodin when I was visiting him in San Francisco and had a headache) but I had no idea he sunk as low as meth.
This was a guy who wanted to compose classical music when I met him in middle school. He was very intellectual and well-read even then. He eventually went to Indiana University, which has one of the world’s top music schools, for composition. He always was very full of life and cheer and how far he has fallen! I knew he'd sunk really low back when he conned me, but this was the first friend I ever made in middle school in the eighth grade after going through all of seventh grade with no friends and we could and did talk about anything for hours, so I kept him in my life for as long as I could.
After college, he got way into restaurants and cooking and was working at some really high-end places, so when he contacted me and told me he wanted to do a pop-up restaurant as a way of starting a full business and needed $400, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. We mostly talked to each other online at that point, so he gave me a pretty false picture of his life.
I’m honestly not sad about the end of the friendship anymore. I cut him completely out of my life 13 years ago and I do not miss him at this point. Would it have been nice to sit together on a porch in the nursing home in 40 years and spend hours talking about Kafka? Sure. But I'm not losing any sleep over it. In fact, when she told me about the database, it was the first time I had thought about him in ages, but he was the only person I thought of and I had to look.
So I'm not sad about it. I shouldn't even be surprised about it. But it's so weird knowing my former closest friend is spending a year in prison.
Have you ever found out anything like this about an old friend you lost touch with?
Murder via fentanyl is accidental at best but foreseeable.
He didn't mean any harm. But he didn't avoid doing it either.
He's an idiot, but was never a malicious one back in the days when I really knew him.
That's how I felt about my former friend too. He felt like he was very generous and was always kind to me... until he tried to fuck me over. I talked about it to another friend today. She knew he was in prison and said she felt he still had a good heart. I told her about the con thing and she said he was in an even worse place back than and wasn't surprised, but she didn't blame me for cutting him off. Another friend told me that they cut him off a few years before I did due to all the drugs and hadn't seen him in 25 years.
Even though he did that to me, I still have a lot of pity for him, because my ex-friend also moved down to Mexico for a few years and came back with a boyfriend who seemed to really love him and it seemed like he had finally gotten his shit together. This was before Obergefell legalized gay marriage, but they were planning to get married as soon as it was legalized and everything was looking up. He even changed his last name to his partner's last name before it was legal. But they must have had a bad breakup or something because between him staying at my apartment with his boyfriend for a couple of weeks and my daughter being born about five years later, he was single and trying to con me.
On the other hand, the con was a big lie, so who knows what other lies he told me over the years, including about his ex-partner (who spoke very little English when they stayed over, so we have no idea now if things were being honestly translated.)
So I have this weird image of him as being, as my first friend said, a guy with a good heart and a guy who tried to fuck me over when I had a new baby.
But I still don't feel bad about him being in prison.
If it's accidental I don't entirely understand how it's not manslaughter.
I agree, and was surprised at the verdict.