I remember Trey from back in 2007\/8 when he was 14 and in my freshman English class. Trey was a nice enough kid, although far from a standout scholar. He graduated from high school in 2012 and seemed to languish for awhile, which is not unusual, from what I read in his obituary. It took Trey four years to amass the community college units to transfer to a four-year school. I suspect this was the turning point in his life; Trey seemed to find direction and purpose through the study of the Portuguese language. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree in Portuguese from UCSB and later earned his Master’s Degree from UCLA in the study of that language. He planned on working towards a PhD. Trey seemed to have fallen in love with the nation of Brazil and its language. He was well launched into adult life. And then Trey\u2019s person just happens to be in the path of an errant bullet fired recklessly by a street criminal, and his life is over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By coincidence, one of the books I was reading while in the Caribbean Sea was \u201cGangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America,\u201d by Ioan Grillo. I read an entire chapter about the Red Commando (CV) and Primer Comando Capital (PCC) gangs which largely control many of the favelas of Brazil. Would it surprise me that a street gang member in Rio de Janeiro \u2013 probably barely able to read and write his own name \u2013 fired a gun at a bus without paying much mind to what was behind his target, and thereby killed an innocent bystander with a stray bullet? That such a thing could happen?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, it does not surprise me at all. Having just read all about it, such a thing does not surprise me in the least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it does surprise me that such a killing in Brazil would touch someone known to me from the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rest in peace, Trey. You did not deserve to die this way. Many of my former students impress me greatly in how as adults they find their place in the world and achieve success. I am often amazed at where they end up and the unusual roads they traveled to get there. Persons like Trey achieve so much, travel so far, learn so impressively, and lead such interesting lives. The opposite is also equally true. Some former students do little with their lives, travel next to nowhere, and impress nobody. They languish \u2013 or worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, there is the last death I read about on my iPhone when I docked in Orlando, Florida, this Saturday morning. I saw how the volatile actress Anne Heche had that week crashed her car into someone\u2019s home in Mar Vista, California. The house almost burned down, and Heche was horribly burned while trapped in her car. It was later reported that Heche had cocaine and fentanyl in her system, and was driving impaired when the accident happened. Kept alive on machines, she was brain dead. They unplugged Heche from life support machines a week later. All I have to say about that is: Good riddance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can be painful to read the news. That is for sure. Is ignorance of the latest misery in the wider world a boon? Is almost all news fit to print bad news in practice? Is ignorance of breaking news bliss? Should I go back to the Caribbean and ignore the rest of the world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, the biggest news for me last Saturday while emerging from vacation back into the \u201creal world\u201d was the brutal stabbing of author Salman Rushdie. A wide-eyed zealot of Shia Islam, apparently radicalized by a trip to Lebanon and operating on his own, rushed the stage where Rushdie was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY and viciously stabbed him several times before members of the crowd stopped him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n