RIP Ashley DeWitte

So I'm at work and recently got a text from Carrie. She asked me if I remembered a girl named Ashley DeWitte and I said yes. I was expecting to have Carrie tell me that she saw her at the grocery store or something silly like that since the two of them never got along. Instead I recieved a text that informed me that she had been shot and killed by her ex boyfriend last night. I couldn't believe it so I went online and looked it up and it's true. He shot her to death, and then shot and killed himself. She was a year behind me in school but we were friends during junior high; not close friends but friends none-the-least.

She was in TrailBlazers with me and we liked a lot of the same things and got along great. She didn't have many friends at that time and so we hung out during school and while at TrailBlazer's events as well. Then when I went to high school I didn't even have a number for her or anything and none of my friends liked her so I never really saw her. That is, until I started hanging around Brandon. Ashley was his first girlfriend, even though he never "counts her as a girlfriend." But we all started hanging out together again, it was a huge group of us actually. Ashley had started making friends of her own, Brandon was Mr. Popular at Poston, and Monika and I both had a decent group of friends from Mountain View. After Brandon and Ashley broke up, he and Monika started dating and then when she treated him poorly he broke up with her and since I had been the shoulder that he cried on, he ended up with me. So then Ashley and I really started hanging out again because she still liked him and couldn't figure out what she had done to lose him. She hung around me a lot, asking me what she could to do better with her next relationship and blah blah blah. We became pretty close actually.

Then when my junior year started all the friends that had been haning out were now going to the same school. I hadn't seen a lot of them after Brandon and I and Wes and I broke up but since Brandon and I were friends and Wes was no longer at school our friends all started hanging out again and once again Ashley and I became semiclose. However, she was very popular with the boys by this point which made a lot of girls jealous, including the majority of people in the group. So she got squeezed out but managed on her own. Occationally she would come up to me with a huge smile on her face and give me a big hug like we were the best of friends. I really liked her because of this. She was just one of those people that was always positive no matter what. Again though, most of my friends didn't like her, so she slowly stoped coming around. I completly lost contact with her.

Honestly, I should have stood up for her probably and not have let my friends treat her so poorly. But honestly, there was nothing I could have done about that. I just wish that bad things didn't happen to good people. She didn't deserve to be shot, she was only eighteen years old. After reading the news article, I'm glad to see that she had friends that were there for her. But what really makes me angry, is that Carrie was laughing that she died. That is so aweful! Just because you don't like someone doesn't mean you should feel that it's okay to laugh because they've been murdered. Jeez!

I'm sorry Ashley, rest in peace.

"I am just a girl looking for a good time with friends. likes all types of music and movies. im pretty easy to get along with. I'll admit that I'm way to laid back, and I'm always up for trying new things. I am very social and love meeting new people. I try to go out of my way to please people, because i would rather see a smile on your face than a frown." - Ashley

This is a press photo that they show before the article.

Ashley graduated from Mountain View this past May of 2009.

This is Ashley. A normal, eighteen year old girl.