27 wild and heartbreaking stories about friend breakups

27.

And finally a longer story: “Our group of friends consisted of three people. … There was me, Derek and Rob. Rob was … usually the life of the party. Derek was much more laid back; just a good guy, but not really good with the ladies. I was kind of just the youngest and most immature. … Rob graduated much earlier than the rest of us. Derek was next and I was the last one still in high school. After high school, we all kind of drifted apart. Derek went into the military.”

“Rob just kept doing the same shit he always did in high school: cheating on girls, doing drugs, selling drugs, etc. … I just kept working because I was the one living in poverty.

Around 2009, my sister called me hysterically and said that our friend Derek had died. It hit me like a cold stone. I was stunned and couldn’t believe it. It was impossible… Anyway, I turned to our old group of friends (Rob and a few others who had joined the group after they graduated). They were not good people, so I had stopped hanging out with the group. Rob just attracted those types of people and Derek was just one of those guys who sees the good in everyone.

The story I was able to piece together was this: One of the new friends to the group was getting married, so this evening was his bachelor party. They started at a strip club, but another in the group suggested they end the evening in the next state gambling at a casino. Derek went and withdrew… a few thousand in cash so he could pay the groom to gamble, and maybe some others in the group who might have been struggling at the time, so everyone could get in on the celebration.

At the strip club, one of the dancers noticed that Derek had a lot of cash on him. … She became more and more affectionate with him and eventually asked him what he planned to do when they were done. He told her the plan. Well, she wanted to come along and just hang out with him while everyone else was partying since he was more laid back. … He agreed and the plan was for her to leave work, go home and change and they would pick her up from there.

When they got to her house, he knocked on the door. The dancer’s boyfriend was waiting to ambush my buddy and take his money. He ran around the side of the house and punched him square in the face. My buddy was completely dazed at this point, so he hadn’t prepared for the punch, nor was he expecting anything other than picking up a cute girl. He went down like a sack of potatoes, landing right on the back of his head. He was bleeding everywhere and the “friend group” finally realized what was going on and ran to help him.

They put him back in the car and drove him home. They had to drive past THREE hospitals to get to his house. He was unconscious and bleeding all over the back seat of the car. They took him home, a full hour from where it all happened. He didn’t live in our hometown anymore, so they took him to his mom’s house. They left him on the couch and told his mom he had just been drinking a lot. (They must have cleaned him up by now.) She thanked them for getting him home “safely.”

The next morning it was late and Derek’s mother was worried and tried to wake him up. He had died in his sleep. His mother and sister never really got over it. He was truly a shining light in many people’s lives, including mine.

I wasn’t there so I can’t really take some of the information I got to heart, but many seem to believe it was all a set-up and when they took him to his mother’s house they knew they shouldn’t have done it. They just wanted to make a quick buck, right? I never thought a few thousand dollars was worth our friend’s life. I still think about him today and the fact that I haven’t seen his mother and sister in years. They don’t live in the same house anymore.

The funeral was the last time we were all together. … I don’t really speak to the group anymore. In fact, I get internally angry and upset when someone asks me about our old group from those early days of my life, wishing I knew what really happened and why the hell they decided to neglect medical care for someone who wouldn’t have done the same thing to them.”

—u/RedcrosKnight