My Roommate and the Shooter

            It is a posthumous photograph, taken after the police killed him, but his eyes were still open.   If you didn’t know he was dead, you would think the man in the picture was just a little dazed.  The photograph is all over the internet now; it accompanies almost every news article about him.  A few days ago, he went on a shooting rampage in a public place, some people are dead and others are wounded.  I hadn’t seen him in over ten years, but I recognized him immediately.

            He was my roommate’s boyfriend.  To be honest, my roommate and I were just assigned to the same room freshman year at college, we weren’t close, and I never knew her boyfriend all that well.  I knew he was very smart, I knew he dressed a little strangely, I knew she eventually broke up with him and didn't want to talk about it much, and it never would have occurred to me that he could do something like this.  His mental illness really seems to have taken hold long after he left the college we both attended. 

            College doesn’t seem that long ago.  My friends from college are still my friends.  Several of my college books are still on the shelf.  Today I am wearing a sweater that I wore in college.  It wasn’t that long ago that he was a young man with a promising future.  Today a photograph of his dead face is on the internet.  Lives were ruined.  The tragedy cannot be undone.  Those of us who knew him long ago are not the important ones in his life or in this story.  We are left with the memories of a bright young man, the sort of person you would never think anybody would have to worry about.  If only he could have been that person forever.