“The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus

9 Another Sad Chapter

185 1 At 1:34 a.m. on Friday, November 12, twelve Kalamazoo students received this e-mail: This quarter has really been a tough one for me and many others. I would like to thank all of you so much for all of your help. You all have been the motivation for me to keep going during these grim times. I received this letter today (below). I know this is going to hurt to read, but I think that Neenef has some really important things to say. I guess Neenef wrote this before he took his and Maggie’s life. All you can do is read it with care and learn from it. He would have wanted it that way. Please also visit the web site that Neenef’s brother set up for him. This address is below. [The Web site no longer exists.] Thank you Neenef for being such an important part of our lives. Thank you for always being there for us. You shall never [sic] be missed. Yours Sincerely, Navin Anthony “May you rest in peace” 9 ANOTHER SAD CHAPTER CHAPTER 9 186 The letter that Navin appended is an e-mail forwarded to him on Thursday , November 11. Who sent it and how long it had been circulating in cyberspace is unknown. It reads as follows: 10/17/99 Here’s the whole story. You can interpret it whichever way you like, but here’s the truth that led to all the mistreatment, pain, and sorrow. We met in January of this year and at first I thought this was just going to be yet another one of those girls I’d get with and then leave and not think twice about it. The one thing that changed all this was two weeks after we went out she told me she was falling in love with me. No one I’ve been with had said anything like this to me so it came as a shock and I couldn’t respond. But the closer we came to be the more I realized what it was about. I felt what I thought was love for her. We went through 8 months of this, the beginning being better than the end. She promised me that we’d work things out and that this month I was going to be home was going to be a good break for us to see how much we really loved each other. A week before I came back to school I hear that she had screwed another guy and this completely made me furious. It made me feel like I can’t live with myself. And since I’ve been here this is how I’ve been feeling. She’s had so much control over me that anything she said either built my selfesteem or broke it. And slowly and surely I wasn’t getting any better. The more I tried to forget about her, and worse it would get. The more I said to myself I couldn’t love her, the stronger that love grew. So it was a big conflict I had to deal with. On the other hand, since the day she broke up with me based on a mistake she made, she was out dating, drinking, and having fun on my expense. I tried very hard to sit and try to understand the sudden change, but there was no explanation to I could come up with. It doesn’t make any sense to me how a person can go from being the most caring, loving human being, to the most heartless and cruel person imaginable. It seemed that she didn’t care for me after 8 months of trying to prove to me she did. This is what drove me over the edge a little more. To add to this, I’ve had nothing in the past 20 years besides grief and sorrow in my life. Having met Maggie I actually believed that life may not be so bad. And I believed this for 8 long months. Here’s how it ends. Another sad chapter in the story of my life. My purpose in writing this is for all—family and friends—to see that ANOTHER SAD CHAPTER 187 life is too short to be spent hurting one another. You can’t love anyone unconditionally [sic—he certainly means “conditionally”]. Loving someone means never giving...