Unbelievable.

 You know how things just pop into your mind sometimes? Last night, I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep and failing miserably at it, and I thought of a name. It just popped into my head. He was a coworker, a quiet, awkward sort of fellow. He was middle aged, clean cut. He collected the recycling where I worked. 

He had a crush on a girl, and it was very obvious. Like him, she was an athlete. She was a runner. He always stopped to talk with her as he passed the table where she worked. She always spoke to him pleasantly enough, but once he was gone, she giggled and sniggered to her friends and made fun of him for being weird. 

Meanwhile, another girl watched the recycling man with big moony eyes from another table. He didn't notice her. 

It was just a strange little triangle, and I felt sorry for him, because he was quiet, and polite, and a very hard worker. For some people, I guess it is just not enough. 

I lost track of the work dramas when I retired, but then there was a shocking story. A man from our county had gone to upstate NY. He'd begun behaving very erratically. He crashed his vehicle after a chase, and then he exited the vehicle with a gun. Ultimately, he was shot and killed by the police. 

I kept thinking that I recognized the name. I knew that I knew that name. It suddenly came to me. It was my coworker, my quiet, polite coworker. 

I was stunned. 

Last night more than a year after he died, he came to mind yet again and I wondered what had actually happened there. There was a lot of talk, a lot of conjecture, but I had never heard what actually happened. Some people felt it was drugs. He never struck me as a drug person. My theory was that he was into some serious physical fitness stuff, and he was taking supplements. I knew that some of those supplements can be dangerous. Some can even cause psychotic breaks. I also kind of had the feeling that he had struggled with some previous mental health issues. I don't know why. Perhaps it was his lack of self awareness. Or maybe it was just his awkwardness around people. If he was taking some sort of drugs for that, perhaps a supplement had interacted badly.

I got my sleepless self out of bed and came out to see if I could find the results of the autopsy and the toxicology reports. I was soon immersed in the case. In the end, I was wrong. It was drugs. He had quite a pharmacy inside his truck. 

You never really know people, do you? 

I was about to close out and head back for bed when the body cam footage came up. I didn't want to watch, but couldn't NOT watch. It was 14 minutes long. Four police officers pleaded with him to put down his gun and step away from it. They told him repeatedly that whatever was wrong could be fixed, that they wanted to help. 

And then I heard it: "DO NOT POINT THAT GUN AT US. DON'T DO IT." 

The rest was lost in a hail of gun fire.

The video ended with them doing first aid as they waited for the ambulance. 

I shut down the computer and headed back to bed, but I lay awake for a while longer, and I thought of an awkward, lonesome guy, a hard worker. He just was the very last person in the world that I could imagine dying the way he did. 

One and half years later, in the middle of the night, I still cannot quite fathom it.