I met this kid…shortly thereafter his father threw him and his brother off a balcony and jumped. No note. No explanation. Only questions.

There are many mysterious and baffling true crime cases that have been covered ad nauseam on the internet—cases with many odd details that have been studied and analyzed thoroughly by the masses to try to make sense of… This is not one of those cases. This is a case that was opened and shut with no resolution, no answers, no information—forgotten almost as soon as it happened…but I remember. Maybe this isn’t my story to tell, but I fear that the world may have forgotten this strange case and I’m the only one who can remember the tragic and horrifying incident that occurred twenty years ago.

It was a bright spring day in St. Louis, Missouri at the elementary school where I attended. It was a quaint little private school in the suburbs where doctors and lawyers sent their kids to try to get them into good high schools—the kind of school that is so cloistered from the harsh realities of life that the students remain blissfully unaware of the horrors that exist outside their Americana Pixaresque dreamscape. My friend had to move away cause his dad lost his job at Anheuser Busch—I thought that was the worst thing that ever happened to anybody. At least until what happened to Carl…

On this bright and sunny day our class had a visitor. His name was Carl. This was quite exciting because we were a particularly small class. I want to say that we were only about 20 students at the time. We were all friendly kids and we all wanted to meet the new boy who might be joining our class. I consider my memory for faces to be quite good. I might be one of the few people alive who can still remember Carl’s face… He was part Asian and part white. He had reddish brown freckles. He was a bit on the tall-side and a bit on the chubby side. And maybe this is cliche, but he was always smiling. He really was. I remember because he smiled so much and he was so happy that it actually confused me a bit. He seemed almost overwhelmed or surprised that kids were talking and playing with him…It made me think like “Don’t you have friends?” “Haven’t you ever played kickball before?” He really sucked at kickball, so I thought maybe he didn’t have any friends and maybe he had never played kickball. I don’t know…just felt like something was off—like he didn’t have the same background as the rest of us in a way. I could be wrong about that, but that’s how it felt.

Anyway, everyone in the class liked Carl cause he was always laughing and smiling and he reacted to our everyday mundane school lives like it was six flags. It’s just easy to like a kid like that I suppose. Carl did end up enrolling at the Wilson School. We all saw him over the summer at a party (I can’t remember the nature of this party). He was the same way he was when he visited the school—a bit awkward and clumsy, but always laughing and smiling and enjoying being around friendly kids.

Well, you may have guessed by now but that’s the last any of us saw of Carl. It was the night before my first day of fourth grade. My mom had just turned at the light and was saying goodnight, but then she sat on the edge of my bed and got this tone in her voice the she got when she was discussing an adult topic with me. She told me that Carl would not be joining our class and her explanation was so far beyond the understanding of a fourth grader that I don’t even think my brain processed it as factual information at the time. I can’t really explain it, but what she said to me was so shocking that the real gravity of it all never really fully hit me—like it was just a story or something. To this day, I have the foggiest why my mom told me in such blunt terms what happened to Carl. Months later I heard other students saying “Carl went to a different school” or “Carl got sick and couldn’t come here.” I knew that their parents had chosen a different route than my mother.

For twenty years now I’ve wondered if maybe I misunderstood what my mom said to me or maybe I imagined or dreamed it. It actually wasn’t until today that I actually confirmed through some internet research that the story I remembered my mother telling me about the heart-wrenching demise of Carl Van Dyk was the horrifying truth:

“Carl won’t be in your class tomorrow. His father threw him and his brother off a balcony and then jumped.”

“Why?”

“His father had a sickness in his mind that makes it difficult to say why he did what he did.”

I always thought that if what I thought I remembered my mom saying was true that there would be more to the story than what she said, but that she just wouldn’t tell me because it was too adult. However, I was shockingly wrong about that. Carl’s family was normal. They were nice people. Carl’s father had no reason to do what he did. Carl’s father had no history of mental illness. Before the trip to Miami that ultimately culminated in the incident, Carl’s grandfather got a call from Carl’s father and he said Carl’s father seemed paranoid and out of touch with reality. Carl’s mother heard a boy scream and entered the hotel room to see Carl’s father disappearing over the edge of the balcony.

I find it odd how quietly this new broke. It’s like all the adults just said “How sad.” and went about their business without so much as a question. It’s almost as if people were like this was a normal or expected event. But it wasn’t normal or expected or even explainable. Even as a child I found it difficult to accept that an ordinary person could throw basically their whole family out the window and jump without a reason or so much as a sign that something was wrong. I guess I’m still left wishing I had more information.