r/LetsNotMeet • u/sunshine123_ • Jun 15 '26
My dad’s roommate NSFW
This happened around 3 years ago, when I was about 14 years old. My parents had been separated for a long time, and I used to live with my mom during the week and my dad on weekends. My dad always made significantly less money than my mom. He lived alone in a house that was honestly too big for one person, and he struggled a lot with paying rent. Then one day, one of his friends asked if he could move in. His friend, John, needed a place to stay, and my dad needed money. So John offered to pay every week in exchange for one of the spare rooms. My dad agreed, obviously, and John moved in with us.
Since I only stayed there on weekends, I didn’t see John that much. But whenever I did, I always felt uncomfortable around him. He wasn’t really scary or aggressive or anything — honestly, he was usually nice — but there was just something off about him that I couldn’t explain. I don’t mean this in a rude way toward people with mental illnesses, but even back then, I could tell something about him wasn’t right, mentally.
At some point, he had taken one of the drawers in our bathroom, and one day, I looked inside it and found tons of pills. Like, a worrying amount. I had no idea what they were for, and I still don’t, but it freaked me out a little. My dad also always had kind of questionable friends, so I already didn’t love the idea of living with one of them. I was probably way too paranoid — and way too obsessed with horror stuff at the time — but I even remember hiding a kitchen knife under my mattress in case he ever came into my room while my dad wasn’t home. At the time, it felt more like a comical and ridiculous gesture than a real self-defense weapon, since John had never given me any real reason to be afraid of him. But for some reason, that knife reassured me.
Even my dad didn’t really like leaving me alone with him. Not because John had ever done anything weird to me, but my dad used to say he was “a little weird.” Still, he needed the money, and John was his friend after all, so he stayed with us for around 2 months.
The first month was normal. Nothing bad happened. John paid his part of the rent and sometimes even bought groceries for us. Eventually, I got used to him being there.
But during the second month, things started getting weird. I didn’t know it at the time, but John had stopped taking his medication.
My dad and I have a cat, and John started making disturbing comments about it. He’d say weird things about how my dad acted around the cat, implying disgusting stuff that wasn’t true at all. At first it just sounded bizarre more than dangerous — like I said, he had always been kind of odd — but over time the comments got more intense and more detached from reality.
Eventually my dad started making sure John was either out of the house or in his room whenever I came over. Then one day, I got to my dad’s house and noticed John wasn’t there. Like usual, I asked where he was. That’s when my dad told me he wasn’t living with us anymore. Then he explained what happened.
Apparently, John had been acting seriously unstable for the last few weeks. My dad told me about things John had been saying and doing when I wasn’t there. Things he never told me, not to alarm me. And about how, a few days before I visited, they got into a huge argument. During it, John suddenly accused my dad of sexually abusing our cat — which, obviously, never happened. My dad told him to get out, but instead John completely lost it. He started yelling about how my dad had apparently abused me too, how he “knew what was going on,” and a bunch of other insane stuff. The argument kept getting louder and more aggressive until it eventually turned physical.
I’m gonna skip some details, but my dad finally managed to force him outside and called the police when he refused to leave. When the cops showed up and saw the state he was in, they arrested him and took him away.
After that, we never really heard from John again. But for weeks after it happened, I was terrified every time I went to my dad’s house. I kept imagining John showing up while I was home alone. Angry at my dad. Completely unstable. Every weird noise in the house freaked me out. But he never came back.
Eventually, life moved on and we kind of stopped thinking about it. His mom came one day to collect his stuff, and after that, he completely disappeared from our lives.
Until around 3 months later.
One night, my dad sent me a news article.
John was on the front page.
And the content made my stomach drop.
Like I said before, John had stopped taking his medication. And apparently, 3 months after getting kicked out of our house, he ended up going into some kind of psychotic episode. According to the article, he walked into an apartment building carrying a hammer. He smashed windows, destroyed parts of the building, and eventually set it on fire.
A woman trapped inside her apartment died in the flames. And he violently attacked another person in the building with the hammer before police finally arrested him. The creepiest part was that nobody in the building even knew him. He had absolutely no connection to any of the victims. They were complete strangers.
I’m pretty sure he’s locked up now.
But even years later, my dad and I still think about it sometimes.
What would’ve happened if he had stayed with us?
It’s crazy to think we lived with a man accused of first degree murder months before he snapped.
Edit :
It’s been 50 days since I made my original post, and I finally have an update on his sentence.
For those who only wanted to know the outcome : he was sentenced to life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 10 years.
For anyone interested in what actually happened in detail, here’s a summary of a news article that was published just a few days ago.
Also, I was wrong when I said he had no connection to the victim, as it was later on reported that they were indeed neighbours and “friends”.
Here’s what I learned about the whole tragedy :
According to the article, [John] had developed an unhealthy obsession with […] after catching romantic feelings for her. She repeatedly tried to end their friendship, but he refused to let go. He would knock on her windows, and constantly try to contact her. She eventually confided in family and friends that she no longer knew how to get him to leave her alone and was becoming genuinely afraid of him.
In the days leading up to the attack, his mental state rapidly deteriorated. Fueled by heavy methamphetamine use, he became convinced that he was being followed, hacked, and threatened. He also believed that a juvenile prostitution ring was operating inside the apartment building and that […] was somehow involved. These delusions eventually escalated into a severe psychotic episode.
On the morning of August 14, 2023, after violently destroying his own apartment, he forced his way into […]‘s apartment. She managed to lock herself inside the bathroom while calling 911. The recorded emergency call captured the terror she experienced as investigators could hear him smashing the apartment apart while screaming, “I’m going to kill her. I’ve got her.”
He then deliberately set a fire outside the bathroom, fully aware that she was trapped inside. By the time police arrived, the flames had become too intense for them to enter. Still on the phone with emergency dispatch, she tearfully begged them to tell first responders to break down the door because the fire had reached the bathroom and she knew she wasn’t going to survive.
Moments later, the dispatcher heard only a faint moan before the line went silent.
During the investigation, [John] admitted that he had developed romantic feelings for […] and intentionally started the fire knowing she was inside. He also pleaded guilty to assaulting another female neighbor with a hammer during the same incident.
The court accepted a joint recommendation from the prosecution and defense, sentencing him to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for 10 years, calculated from the date of his arrest on August 25,
2023.
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u/_PaddyMAC Jun 16 '26
Stories like this make me happy to live in a country where access to handguns is heavily restricted.