Kristen Radtke writes at The Verge about her childhood friend Alex Pretti:

There is something destabilizing about having known someone only as a child and then hearing they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying in that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way, too, or she sees him at every age all at once, including those he did not live to see.

Heartbreaking. The world is smaller and more connected than we sometimes realize… Everyone is someone’s friend, son, daughter.