"To this day, small bits of shrapnel still surface in my brother’s chest."

I work as a Writer at BuzzFeed, creating and curating quizzes, listicles, and articles that cover everything from pop culture chaos to food trends I immediately want to try and fashion moments I can’t stop talking about.

"The witness was a 3-year-old girl. She recognized the man leaving. It was the husband’s best friend. It turned out that the friend and the husband had made a pact to kill each other’s families and run off with their secretaries. The little girl identified the friend, and apparently, one of them cracked. They both went to jail on multiple counts, largely based on the testimony of a 3-year-old. To this day, I still can’t believe that that man stood right beside me multiple times, and I had no clue. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at life the same way since."

"My dad was obsessively jealous and had found a pack of old condoms in a cupboard. He concluded that my mom must have cheated on him. Never mind that we had only recently moved into the apartment and they could have been left by previous tenants, or that he controlled my mom’s every move and rarely let her go anywhere alone. The police took me to the hospital, where my mom, thankfully, was still alive. 

My dad had attacked her with a full wine bottle, causing severe head injuries. The only reason she survived was that my little brother, who was seven at the time, intervened. If it weren’t for him, my dad likely would have killed her in a fit of jealousy.

When he said I would never see him again, he meant he had planned to kill himself shortly after dropping me off. He did not succeed."

"At 18 and 15, respectively, my brother and I packed up, left the state, and never spoke to our father again. To this day, small bits of shrapnel still surface in my brother’s chest."

"The driver was still intoxicated and seemed unaware of what was happening. He kept asking us to hurry up and get his wife out so they could go home, laughing and stumbling around while speaking with the police. When the paramedics checked for a pulse and found none, we attempted to extricate her from the driver’s side. That’s when we realized the extent of her injuries: her lower left side—from her pelvis to her thigh—had been crushed, and a piece of the door had impaled her through the abdomen. 

When we told him his wife had died, likely from blood loss shortly after the impact, you could see the disbelief slowly shift into realization and then desperation. He sobered up instantly, ran to the driver’s side, and tried to pull her out. It worsened the wound, and we had to restrain him. He then ran to the passenger side and tried to pry the damaged door open. We left the scene shortly after and let the police handle the aftermath. I saw it on the news that afternoon."

"At one point, he began to see light, so he punched upward, broke through the surface, and pulled himself out—soaking wet, gasping for air, and a short distance from the other hikers. They were understandably bewildered when they saw him stumbling back toward them."

"He was found days later. The boys were caught and became the youngest convicted murderers in modern British history. Security footage from the day they took James shows them watching children and selecting a target, though they were children themselves. They were released at 18. One of them was later returned to prison for possessing child abuse material."

"Police found a large amount of surveillance footage of her sleeping, along with pieces of her clothing and other belongings."

Text has been edited for length and clarity.