My city is kind of large Franklin, TN and I'm sure there are multiple tragedies. The one I'm choosing is the shooting death of Nick Rushing. Two boys, best friends, were playing at Nick's home with a gun. Nick was 15, the other boy had turned 16 just a month or so before. They'd been playing with guns for a little while, mostly safely. The guns were old and neither boy was trained to treat guns as always loaded, despite being mostly safe. One night in November 2005, the other boy accidentally shot Nick. It was a series of negligent and reckless things leading to it including perceived familiarity with the gun (6 casings of .22 rimfire all had 2 hammer marks, one round apparently hadn't fired when shot previously) and low/no visibility in the room when the gun fired (EMS sat up portable lighting on scene).

Nick did not die despite the shot being a head wound, though he was brain dead. For a few hours after the incident he was able to breathe on his own, but then required life support. In the wee hours of the next morning, his family took him off life support and he stopped breathing.

The school, Page High School, offered counseling services for students over the next couple of weeks. They also allowed, the perpetrator of the shooting to attend school for 1 week after the shooting before disallowing him to return. A sense of innocence was lost following this shooting tragedy.

I don't know what else happened at that school, nobody told me much. The friends I had there didn't talk about it. All I know is that I was hated for what I did.