I want them answered

Good point. Edited. Thanks for the lookout homie.

Link works for me. I think the parens in the link target are borking it for some people.

As for what it’s like…. It’s weird. I knew him when we were both like 10 or so. My mom and his mom were pretty good friends, so I’d go over to his house any time they wanted to hang out.

He was a normal kid. He liked Nintendo and was trying to learn to play guitar.

His dad though… his dad was a raving psychopath. He used to beat the shit out of both him and his mom. I damn near caught a beating from him once until mom declared that if he was there, we wouldn’t be.

Eventually, I moved to another state, and his family moved to Florida.

A few years later, I was in freshman English class in high school (year 9 for the Brits), and an office runner came and told me I had a phone call.

It was my mom. “Josh killed a girl.” I’m not sure why she thought it was necessary to tell me at school since there was nothing to be done about it, but I guess she wanted to break the news to me before I saw it online or something.

The story on Wiki is pretty accurate from there. His mom was cleaning his room while he was at school because it was starting to smell when she noticed a wet spot under his bed, investigated, and found the body of a missing neighbor girl.

She had been missing for a week or so, I think; it’s been a while. While she was missing, he had even participated in the neighborhood searches for her.

I remember following the story as it developed. It was weird af to be reading about the kid I used to play Mario with on cnn. There was a whole media circus about him. We weren’t involved in any way since we had been moved apart for years.

In hindsight, knowing what I know now, there’s still ZERO indication that he would do something like that. He wasn’t a problem kid, he never let on about any weird sexual things (even hints of budding weirdness), if anything, I was a bad influence on him - he was a well behaved kid and I was the friend that was always like “hey, let’s go throw rocks at cars” or something because I was a little shithead.

I 100% believe the “scared dumbass kid” story the defense put out. I don’t for a second believe any of the “sexually motivated” shit. Every 14 year old had porn hidden in their room in those days. That doesn’t make him a crazed sex killer.

He was a scared kid with a terrifying abusive father that panicked and did something horrifying that can never be taken back.

Did he murder a child? Yes. Is he to blame? 100%.

I do not condone, approve of, or support what he did in any way whatsoever. But knowing his dad, I understand WHY it happened.

Blake’s a good guy, but a little off-putting in person. He’s what my grandmother would call “a character.” I have no doubt he believes what he says, but I doubt the versatility of his claims on this.

All I am willing to say is he is in a discord server I’m also in, and his article details an… Unhealthy obsession he has with Dora the Explorer.

Depends on the person.

Even if you didn’t get injured, or sexually assaulted as part of “hazing”, or pick up a drug habit, playing a sport at a professional level will often ruin you.

During high school you spend all of your non-school time training, so no after school job and your grades probably aren’t great.
Then you get to university, where you play the sport without being paid, and you one again can’t really have a job or focus on your studies.
Then you get drafted (or just hired for some league) into the sport, and you play until your body isn’t good enough anymore. You are then discarded with no job experience, no training, and possibly moving teams/cities every couple years so you don’t really have any non-sport contacts.

If you get into a league that pays insanely well, you are likely fiscally fine. That’s like the NHL, or the NFL. If you only get into the CFL, the WHL, the “minors”, or you play in a women’s league or a sport that not enough people care about, you probably were not paid enough to survive once the game is over.

So, what do you do with no job experience, no contacts, shrinking savings? You get a job that you can leverage your celebrity, like real estate or car sales, or something that you can also do if you have a criminal record or no CV, like roofing or landscaping.

Edit: not that there is anything wrong with any of those jobs, but starting to learn a new job at 40 isn’t fun. Also, if your body isn’t in top-shape anymore, roofing and landscaping is brutal.

Knees and brains usually.

Too many pro-sports leagues use a pay structure that leaves players earning far too little, and the players end their careers with injuries and no compensation.

Well here’s the thing, I’m too disconnected from the local culture, we’re so much poorer than you think yet we brag about how capable we are at hosting world events, there’s racism here, if you’re not Muslim or Jewish then you basically don’t matter, if you’re queer then you also don’t matter, the obsession with football is insane, the local music scene sucks, the education is leagues behind what some of you might call “good”, not to mention terrible terrible television, poor internet speeds, architecture that may look cool but will definitely collapse one day if not taken care of, I could go on and on.

Basically, I have trouble fitting in with society, and I wanna move out. But I don’t know if anyone would wanna take me in.