Back in high school my friends and I would play basketball at Pickwell Park in San Antonio. That place ain’t for the faint of heart, some games ended up with bottles being broken and lives being threatened. It was a tough neighborhood but a lot of good hardworking folks lived in the area. There was a kid that we went to school with that was 2 years younger than us that lived down the street. When the park was full we’d head over to his house to play in his driveway. He was a nice kid with normal hardworking parents but definitely lower middle class.
Fast forward to when I was 20 and he had just graduated from high school. He was trying to get into the Navy but was told he needed to lose some weight first. He was one of our offensive linemen on the football team. I would see him jog around the park occasionally working on his weight. He meanwhile got a job at a local Bill Millers. The story I heard was he made friends with some bad people there that were gang affiliated. They took him out one night and got him high as shit, put a gun in his hand and told him to shoot out the window at a house they had targeted because a rival member lived there. He ended up killing a 16 yr old girl at her birthday slumber party. Got life in jail. I never thought it would have happened to this guy.