The Back Story. Chapter 6

2008 The Year From Hell.

It actually all started with the murder of a young girl I never met.  Eve Carson was the student body President at UNC.  Young, pretty, vivacious, by all accounts, Eve's future was as dazzling as her welcoming smile.  Then one night, two low-life thugs kidnapped, robbed and gunned her down in the streets of Chapel Hill.  In a town known for it's bucolic peacefulness, where high crime is usually the hi jinx of drunken frat boys, Eve's murdered shattered everything I thought about where I lived and who I was.  As the mother of two teenage girls, it also scared me to my core.  We were upper middle class, well educated Americans, living in a safe small town full of upper middle class well educated Americans.  We weren't the people who got murdered!

And then two months later Ira was murdered.

And then two months after that, David was murdered.  Three weeks later, his mother, who was one of the nicest people I ever met, died.

By September my youngest daughter had two close friends die. My mother's best friend's daughter, who was also a friend from high school, died.  There were suicides, car wrecks, diseases and freak accidents.  The bodies kept piling up until the death toll reached nine.  Nine friends.  Most of them children.  Most of them senseless.  The sadness was overwhelming.

In October, my husband lost his job.

Then, in December, my Father died.