Thank you Silvi. This is beautiful. I’m sorry I never got to really know Karl before it was too late.

Thank you so much for posting this story. I was Karl’s RA freshman year and I was utterly shocked when I read about his suicide in the Sun. I was no longer an RA when it happened, but we RAs would always have training about “signs” to look for regarding residents who may appear to be contemplating suicide. I didn’t see any of them in Karl, who I remember usually being surrounded by people and acting extremely sociable. He always seemed to be full of creativity and very responsive to even some of the dullest programs that I put on in the residence hall. I think that you have done an excellent job capturing the Karl that I remember and thank you greatly from providing some more insight into a wonderfully complex individual who sadly left us far too soon.

During the week we spent together, we were inseparable. We even had a secret language that we invented during a game of nonsense Scrabble. I still remember a couple of the words:

xenudens: an STD that causes pattern baldness in the nether regions
drugy: good-looking

I remember spending an afternoon walking up and down High Street (the main drag on the OSU campus) together, looking at things in the shops, having a Big, Heavy Discussion. His girlfriend at the time was — as I recall — a girl named Julie. A blond. Like me. Karl told me that if it weren’t for her, he could see something happening between the two of us. I guess I could, too.

One of the side trips we took was to some kind of government building (the police station? a forensics operation?) where we met a detective who corresponded with serial killers. Karl and I were pretty inspired by the stories he told and decided to begin our own fictional correspondence, which we would only discuss in letters in the role of our characters. We would never mention it outside of that context. I was the detective; he was the serial killer. This correspondence continued for several months after the Essex School had finished. We simultaneously kept in touch by e-mail, as ourselves.

Once the school year started, I took a road trip from Aurora (near Cleveland) to Central Ohio to visit Kenyon College. I passed through Fredrickstown on the way back and visited Karl’s farm. I remember we had a lovely farm lunch and I drank unpasteurized whole milk for the first time.

We talked about colleges — which was all anyone was talking about at that time. He had decided that he would settle for no less than Harvard and convinced me to apply. He didn’t get in, as I recall. I was wait-listed.

I was in Guinea in late 2005 when an old high school friend got in touch with me. He had gone to Cornell and I knew it was a long shot, but I asked if he knew Karl Brown. He said, “Wasn’t that one of the guys who killed himself?”

I was shocked and disbelieving, but the internet confirmed that he had indeed committed suicide. So — thank you for writing this. I never really got the story.