"I was waiting for my mom to get home, and it felt like it was taking an extra long time. I asked my father where she was. His response? "Probably out getting r**ed.""

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The comments below have been edited for length and clarity. 

"All of a sudden we heard what kind of sounded like a plane, but we couldn’t see anything. He started driving through this field a little faster. Off-road time! Well, weird off-road time. We would slide around, then stop; his dad would pick something up, and then back to sliding around. This happened about 10 times. Years later, I looked my friend up online and found his sister. I sent her an email, and she called me. We caught up, and she told me my friend and their dad had been killed in a drug raid a couple years after we had moved. They were collecting packages of drugs in a field, and border patrol had been waiting to catch them. His dad tried to get away and drove off of a cliff. After that I started remembering things like running through their house and stumbling across them trying to heat up a vase. I remember cut-up straws (cut in four?) all over the place when we would clean up. It broke my heart to hear about what happened. Because there were so many things I just didn’t understand." 

"Being a kid and witnessing that level of gore so frequently desensitized me to it. I didn't realize how bad it was growing up in a household with a dying parent until I was much older."

"I said, 'Well mom, I don’t think they’d think much.' I proceeded to explain the conditions of his house, my mother was shocked and insisted he sleep over whenever he needed, but only if I made sure he learned to clean up after himself and was well-fed." 

"My other brother got his life together and has made a living for himself. It’s not something obvious, but as a child, I didn’t understand why this would happen. I still get nightmares or flashbacks about this fight till this day."

"Everyone in the complex was worried about her, so they used me to get into the house to check on her welfare. 30+ years later, I can still picture it."