What Shapes Me

How One Tragedy Helped Shape the Writer I Am

Thanks to David von Diemar @davidvondiemar for making this photo available freely on Unsplash 🎁 https://unsplash.com/photos/jM6Y2nhsAtk

At nineteen, I was still young enough to believe that maybe I was invincible, not that I believed that I would never die, but I believed death would not touch me in the way it did, through a tragic double murder of a Father and his Son, a twelve year old boy who was so brilliant, he could have cured cancer, but he’s forever twelve, and Neal was the most laid back guy you could ever met, a man with a good heart, who loved his wife and child.

Neal was the Proprietor of of Precision Tune Auto Repair on San Pablo Avenue in Pinole, and Brendan, 12, was a seventh-grader at Pinole Middle School, where he excelled in computers and science.

But that’s just a vague description of the Father, who gave me my first laptop when I proclaimed I wanted to be a writer at a time when laptops are far less common than they are now, an intelligent man with a generous spirit, to say the brutal murder of Neal and his twelve year old so Brenden. It’s actually one of the reasons I write the way I do, even if something tragic happens in my stories, I try to give hope, to give answers because nearly twenty six years later and the Abernathy Murders still remain unsolved.