When I was in my first job out of college, I lived near a high school we covered and used to run three or four miles a day on their track, mostly b/c it was fenced in and I could bring my dog with him and let him run. It was a small town and kids from the football team were hanging around, and I got to know two or three of them better than others. We'd make small talk about local sports, they'd throw a ball for the dog when I was running, whatever.
They all played three sports, so as the sports year when on, I'd see them in various locker rooms, and, again, we'd bull**** a little if it was appropriate.
Then one day, one of them drove into the woods and blew his brains out. Girlfriend trouble. An amazingly impulsive and almost incomprehensible act.
So I wrote a column about the kids, and how I'd come to know them, and how absolutely senseless it seemed. Didn't try to figure anything out, just wrote a bit about the things above. Went to the funeral, parents appreciative, extremely sad.
And then a teacher from the school went crazy. Absolutely crazy. He claimed I was glorifying suicide and stories like mine led to copy cat suicides, and he tried to get me fired. Really tried to get me fired. Called the SE. Called the ME. Called the publisher, I think. Then confronted me at the school and forced me to listen to a good hour's worth of talk about how his wife worked with kids and he knew - just knew - that my column was a dangerous thing.
Thankfully the people I worked for did not share his viewpoint.
