I just found out that my best friend in high school and the best man at my wedding is in prison.

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?

Kaiyoto,

I found out my best friend of 20 years turned into a lesbian. Explained a lot of her behavior towards me in retrospect. I had cut ties with her because she turned into a bitch and I was done with the abuse.

I used find myself really wanting to get in touch with her again because she was like a sister, but I finally realized that I missed the person she was when we grew up and that she was a different person now. That person I was best friends with is long gone.

Kaiyoto,

I found out my best friend of 20 years turned into a lesbian. Explained a lot of her behavior towards me in retrospect. I had cut ties with her because she turned into a bitch and I was done with the abuse.

I used find myself really wanting to get in touch with her again because she was like a sister, but I finally realized that I missed the person she was when we grew up and that she was a different person now. That person I was best friends with is long gone.

xkforce,

A guy I went to school with as a kid ended up going to prison for abducting a woman at gun point from the mall. After reading what happened to a few other kids, my curiosity is gone. I dont want to know.

Hasherm0n,

Found out a year or two ago that a kid I was kind of friends with was convicted of a murder about three years ago. He and two others killed a guy, chopped up his body, and dumped it in a lake.

Small consolation, the only reason they know about the murder is because the guy I knew had a guilty conscience and made a full confession to the police out of the blue one day. Yes, drugs were very much involved.

rhythmisaprancer,
@rhythmisaprancer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

I had a friend in high school that I loosely kept up with, went to their wedding, listened to them about divorce etc. For about 10 years out of school. Then they tried to sell their (9ish year old?) daughter for drugs, thankfully to an undercover agent of some kind.

That was about 10 years ago, no idea where they are now. I had no idea they were using any kind of drug, let alone to that extent. Maybe some x in school. This happened in Ohio. I'm glad you found some good in the area, I left as a young adult haha.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Then they tried to sell their (9ish year old?) daughter for drugs

Holy fuck! That’s insane! I would leave and never come back too.

corsicanguppy, (edited )

I borrowed an earring off a buddy because I lost it just before getting into his car and he had one laying about; just some small hoop. It’s the same car ride where I left my knife behind and he remained adamant he never saw it, despite rumours otherwise about him showing it off. We drifted apart. I never really swapped out the earring.

He died 2 years ago, during COVID. His roommate said he reported some stomach pain and general grouchiness, annoyed by a cough, and was going to go to bed. He left us that night.

He was a surprisingly good cook, we all found, after he joined some local Texican restaurant for work, saving up to pay cash for his 88 supra; which he then wrapped around a tree when he drove home with a light concussion. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

From the restaurant he actually went into cooking school and bounced around a bunch from bistro to posh nosh, steadily gaining skill and cred. He’d found his niche, at last.

I’m disappointed I never met him in his final form.

subignition,
@subignition@fedia.io avatar

First online friend I ever made, decades ago at this point, seemed like an alright dude, but was a little too knowledgeable about viruses and malware. Lost contact, ten or so years later I found his Facebook and discovered he'd gone to prison for nearly half a million dollars of check fraud.

shinigamiookamiryuu,

I have two very close friends. One would routinely end up arrested, the other one would routinely be in the hospital. It was never a surprise it would happen, the surprise usually came in the variety of things that would happen to them (though none of the crimes were malicious, they were all related to “governmental apathy”, such as not keeping the IRS up to date or unauthorized feeding of wildlife). Having mapped out possible arrests, he once told me something that has always given me thought, “there is no personality type you can be unrestrictively without stepping on some law somewhere”.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think he’s wrong about that necessarily, but I also think that there are smart ways to break the law and stupid ways to break the law. Even with illegal substances. I’ve used weed since I was in high school in the 90s. It hasn’t been legal in most of the places I’ve lived in that time. That hasn’t stopped me from using it, I’m just not stupid about it. I transport it when I buy it in an airtight container and I only use it in my office in my garage which has a lock on the door in the extremely unlikely chance of a cop coming over.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I didn’t even have to find out. My friend was being hired to make web pages at $20/hour in 1997 when local minimum wage was still below $5/hour (until September 97 when the Federal Minimum got moved up).

He quickly got into cocaine and then in the following years as the money and his skills dried up, he turned to methamphetamines. I got to see the slow fall, I even got to see him do heroin for his first time.

He was one of two young brilliant men whose brains I would see completely added by meth in my life. Went from reading and understanding Stephen Hawking to scribbling incoherent drawings and writings in the margins like the fucking madman he turned into. He went from having a name to everyone calling him “Mumbles” because he could barely speak coherently anymore.

It’s literally fucking wild how drugs can fuck you up and completely change the direction of your life.

What’s worst, it’s incredibly sad. While I also don’t mourn the loss of the friendship because it’s not my job to pick up after other people’s broken lives, it is still incredibly sad and an indictment of the way our society works. I personally think it speaks to how lost many thoughtful and brilliant people there are who are beaten down by a system that doesn’t give one flying fuck about classical music or Kafka. Knowledge and expertise is laughed out of the room and given a hearty 🤓 🤓 🤓 🤓 🤓 in response. We’re living on the edge of a real Idiocracy. It’s hard for me to not see that thoughtful and interesting people can end up broken by a system that never intended to let them follow their dreams. I certainly feel broken by this system, and I certainly am not “successful” in it. This doesn’t mean that lies and theft are justified, they are assuredly not, but I feel like our system practically pushes people in desperate situations to pursue that, especially when you see the rich getting proverbial slaps on the wrist for far worse than the average criminal. Not justified, but understandable why that kind of behavior ends up arising.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I certainly feel broken by this system, and I certainly am not “successful” in it. This doesn’t mean that lies and theft are justified, they are assuredly not, but I feel like our system practically pushes people in desperate situations to pursue that, especially when you see the rich getting proverbial slaps on the wrist for far worse than the average criminal.

I totally get how you feel, but I think in his case it’s because his dad was an alcoholic who drank a case of beer a day, but despite that, he was rich and so my ex-friend grew up with a lot of privilege that totally ended when he was an adult and his parents divorced. It was sort of inevitable. I just didn’t expect it to get this bad.

LifeInMultipleChoice, (edited )

Drugs give an outlet. Coke costs about twice meth, as money runs lower and lower people start to mix a bit into their coke. Then that mix starts to slowly change ratios. Eventually someone gives in and just says why not. I’ve watched it happen to people. Mental health and financial security provide a stable slab to not need an outlet. We also can protect lives by simply verifying the outlets aren’t tainted with things users weren’t trying to use. Fentanyl deaths are a direct result of the war on drugs. I have never met someone who went somewhere and said “I’m going to do fentanyl.”

Ironic side effects: fix the drug crisis, it hurts the cartels, once the cartels are hurt Mexico gains more control and can start to fix anything they need to. The border crisis slows down as Mexico recovers. That doesn’t include the majority coming from South America and other counties like China but we get to have numbers down where we can assist in building up South American countries and insure they don’t have mass inflation and don’t need to leave. All the sudden the U.S. doesn’t look like the only safe haven. Opportunities now exist for people to succeed and prosper and North and South America becomes larger global trade partners. That reduces emissions as we don’t have to ship items across the Atlantic and Pacific that can be made in our countries.

I want to get into how plaguing opium into China resulted in Fentanyl plaguing the U.S, but that would require us to take responsibility for our countries past actions.

GlitterInfection,

Honestly meth is so common in the gay community that I’m never shocked or surprised by hearing this type of thing about old friends of mine. It’s very difficult to avoid the stuff and have a sex life where I live. Doable but all of the hook-up apps are landmines.

As a result, I only go on Facebook occasionally to scroll through and see if anyone I care about died recently of an accidental overdose or something.

They post less about the going to prison part, so I don’t hear that as often, but I know a lot of people, including close friends, who have spent time in prison and have gotten sober then turned their lives around.

Even though he’s a former friend, I hope your guy does, too.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

He is gay, but I don’t think that has anything to do with why he’s doing meth. I think he just found his rock bottom drug. He had tried everything else to fill that hole he could never fill and ended up a meth-head. This is Indiana, which has a huge meth problem, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to get.

It’s tragic, and I’m sorry he ended up that way, but I have run out of my ability to sympathize at this point. I wish that wasn’t true because I don’t like that about myself, but I’m just beyond caring about his self-destruction.

One of the old friends I talked to about this today said this isn’t the first time he’s been in prison. I’m not going to say he isn’t worth redemption, because everyone deserves a decent life, but I do think he is so beyond help that he’s just not going to get it. He’ll get out again and go right back to drugs and forgery and whatever else until he kills himself doing it.

He’s 47. Honestly, if I hear that he’s dead by 50, I will not be surprised. Again, it would be tragic, but just not surprising at this point.

half_built_pyramids,

The restaurant industry is like the actual gateway drug the government was fear mongering about.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Possibly, considering I was doing (most of) the same drugs he was in college and I’m down to weed, an occasional glass of port and a bloody Mary once in a while.

fluxion,

Music industry too. Noble pursuits but easy to stray off that very narrow path to success

punkwalrus,
@punkwalrus@lemmy.world avatar

Man, so many of my friends, who were high-functioning illectuals nerds like me, ended up is really terrible situations: bad marriages, drug addiction, suicide attempts, and they never grew out of the ideation of a teenage mindset OR they became really bitter victims of their own prison. Now they are in their 50s, and nothing’s changed. For the few friends I managed to keep all this time they ended up “doing okay” or better, I am grateful. Hell, a lot of my punk and goth friends did better on average than my science fiction nerd friends.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I know so many really smart people who peaked in high school and are now in similar situations. Although most of my punk and goth friends didn’t do all that well in their lives either. Maybe we all gut stuck in a Gen X rut by trying and failing not to disappoint our parents for not being as successful as they were.

SnotFlickerman, (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I was in a special program for creative kids as a kid. I remember the director telling my mom something about how kids from this program either ended up massively successful or ended up all fucked up and possibly in jail.

He wasn’t wrong, but he really needed to consider the implications of why that was happening, and a lot of it had to do with class and who had access to real support resources and who didn’t.

All the brilliant poor kids ended up all fucked up and still poor, all the brilliant rich kids ended up rich like their parents. Gee, I wonder why??

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

That doesn’t actually apply in this case. His parents were rich. They were just also negligent and his father was a major alcoholic.

Even if you grow up with privilege, if you grow up without much love, that will fuck you up.

VaultBoyNewVegas,

Not sure how similar this is but the guy that bullied me in secondary school for 5 years is now a professional boxer and as I’m from a small country his name and picture comes up on the news sometimes. The first time I saw an article about him it made me feel miserable as it brought back how he made me feel miserable like I hated going to school because of him. Now I have blocks set up so I never get a recommendation for articles involving him.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

That really sucks. I’m really sorry to hear that. I have a feeling one of the guys who bullied me for a long time is really successful at this point, but I don’t even want to know, so I totally understand. I couldn’t deal with having to learn about how successful he is, especially at doing something violent, after being bullied.

Pronell,

Yup, I’ve written about it here before.

One of my old druggie friends (I’m a stoner, always have been, and have stayed away from the dangerous stuff) apparently sold some stuff tainted with fentanyl and a girl overdosed.

He’s in jail for murder. Not his first time in, he’s proud of his time behind bars, and will likely go full Aryan Nation this time.

Most of our friends have written him off. I play d&d with them a couple times a week.

Another one went to jail for stealing from Walmart repeatedly. Kept telling me he’d never get caught, and when he did, he had meth in his pocket.

He got out, got clean, and was staying in a halfway house nearby. I gave him some yard work to do for cash. He ripped me off, stole some cash.

He returned it when I called him on it, and he’s still doing well and sober, but he’s been cut off as well.

I hope he keeps his shit together. He’s got kids out there that need him. (The other one, in for murder, doesn’t, at least not that I know of.)

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

That’s hard when there are kids involved for sure. And wow, I don’t know how I would even be able to process someone I was once friends with who became a murderer. Sounds like you escaped a bad situation at least.

Pronell, (edited )

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.

daddyjones,
@daddyjones@lemmy.world avatar

If it’s accidental I don’t entirely understand how it’s not manslaughter.

Pronell,

I agree, and was surprised at the verdict.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

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.

RagnarokOnline,

I haven’t, but there’s a guy I knew in middle school who was my best friend. He ended up transferring to another school and we grew apart.

I think about him probably once a month.

I’ve tried looking him up on socials but he doesn’t have much of an online presence. That said, what I was able to find was pretty sketchy and like he was falling into the wrong crowd as he aged.

I still have affection for him, but sometimes I worry that if I met him again it wouldn’t be a good experience.

Sorry about your friend and his choices, bud.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Oh, sorry, that was totally rude of me. I forgot to say that I hope you find your friend soon. Apologies.

FlyingSquid, (edited )
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Like I said, I’m over it and have been for a long time. Honestly, I’m kind of glad he’s in prison even if I hate the drug war. Feels like a little bit of karma.

I’ve had bad luck with best friends though. My elementary school best friend died when he was in his 20s- however, he was autistic with symptoms severe enough that he could probably have never lived on his own, so in that sense, I’m glad his parents outlived him, and he died after a very short illness, so he wasn’t in a lot of pain. Now I do miss him. He was always happy and smiling. He was obviously bullied in high school like any weird kid would be, but surprisingly little because it’s pretty hard to bully a guy who’s happy all the time.

I am the king of shitty luck though, so this actually feels good for a change.

Edit: I would love to see his mugshots, but that’s not in public records. So instead, I’m spreading gossip amongst my friend group.

RagnarokOnline,

I’m glad there’s some schadenfreude — it can feel really good to see someone meet their consequences.

I hope you’ve just been front-loading your bad luck and that you become the king of good luck soon :)

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