It’s easy to forget how fragile life truly is. Nevertheless, it can end at any moment—and these people nearly learned that the hard way. Whether it’s a near-fatal accident of some kind or a diabolical plot that gets foiled just in time, one can never forget the experience of almost ending a fellow human being’s life. Here are 50 people’s personal stories about the closest that they’ve ever come to killing someone.
1. Almond of Me Loves Almond of You
I was in the fifth grade. We were studying the ancient Greeks, and we had a feast in our class to celebrate what we were learning about. My mom and I prepared baklava for the occasion. Then, after serving it to everyone, I found out the hard way that a girl in my class was allergic to almonds. She didn’t know at the time either. The whole experience completely traumatized me.
2. Pro-Wrestling With a Toddler
When I was 15, I was carrying my two-year-old cousin down a flight of stairs when I suddenly tripped and we fell down three steps. She fell on the back of her head and I landed on top of her. For a split second, I feared the worst, but then she started crying. At that moment, I thought she was dead. Thankfully, she was fine, but I'm so glad that she didn't fall harder or over the handrail.
In that case, she would have fallen at least three meters and probably wouldn’t be here today.
3. Them’s Fighting Words
Right after suffering a miscarriage, my sister-in-law decided to tell me that I don’t know what being part of a family is like, since it was just me and my husband. She insisted that kids are what make a family and mocked me about it. I had to be dragged away by my husband because I was literally seconds away from getting violent on her.
I was so mad that I was ready and willing to go to prison over that idiot!
4. Striking First
My stepdad once spit in my mom’s face, so I shoved him. He said that he was going to come back and kill us, then ran out the door. So, I followed him, picked him up from behind, carried him off the porch, and slammed him headfirst onto the cement. I then proceeded to beat the daylights out of him. When the neighbors came out, they called the cops.
I got hauled to jail and received my first felony charge.
5. No Right to Live
The only time in my life when I came anywhere close to killing someone was when I first found out that my wife had been assaulted by her own father. At that moment, I felt that this man had no right to live and there was absolutely nothing that could have stopped me from acting on that feeling if I had been in the same room as him at the time.
6. Ready, Aim, Fire!
I had my hand on my gun and was ready to draw and fire. No, I’m not a cop. I was the victim of an attempted carjacking. Thankfully, the criminal noticed what I was doing as soon as I started to lift up my hand. He immediately backed off and stopped coming at me. Another second or two and I would have shot him.
7. Giving Him an Ultimatum
I was sitting in my room one day when I suddenly heard my sister screaming at her boyfriend down the hall. I walked over to discover that he had laid his hands on her while they were having a fight. I immediately went to the kitchen, grabbed the chef's knife, turned to him, and gave him an ultimatum. I told him that he could either leave or he could die.
He left.
8. Working Overtime
My boss once asked me why I wasn't doing any work. This was after working a 70-hour workweek where I took just one lunch break all week long. I was so mad and worked at a job where we always carried knives on our person. I had to throw mine across the room to stop myself from stabbing the guy with it. After that, I just picked up my bag and walked out.
This was also before my actual start time, after I had already been working almost half an hour extra and still wasn't supposed to be starting for another half hour…
9. An Extremely Vicious Cycle
I once had a patient who was essentially a vegetable. I had to wrestle with him and keep him physically pinned to the bed while the nurse pumped fluids out of his lung through a hole in his neck. Most of his muscles had contracted, but he was still shaking and stuff due to the pain we were probably inflicting on him by doing this.
This guy's entire existence at that point consisted of just lying in bed, constantly in pain and partially choking on the fluids his body was producing inside his lungs, only to be pinned down and have us remove the worst parts of it before the cycle would begin anew every hour or so. It was heartbreaking. This was not health care; this was just cruel.
It would have been more humane to just let him die. I felt ashamed and still do for being part of it.
10. Blowing Hot Air
I was a little kid. My cousins and siblings—all a few years younger than I was—were in the bathtub while I was using the hairdryer to dry my hair. I had an idea to make some waves for them in the tub, so I held the hairdryer very close to the water. My mother and aunt lost it on me. I will always remember how they, for obvious reasons, yelled at me for hours.
I never put anything electric close to water again...
11. Saved by the Trees
I was once driving to my aunt's house down a residential street where the speed limit was 25. I was going the speed limit or maybe even a little less because the sun was setting and getting in my eyes. In the shade of a tree, a kid was riding leisurely across the street. He had to have seen me because there were no cars parked on the street and it wasn't on a hill.
I didn't see him at first because of the sun in my eyes. I only spotted him in the shade of the tree when I was inches away from his bike. I slammed on my brakes, slammed on my horn, and just barely missed the kid. His reaction was chilling. He didn't even look at me or acknowledge my presence at all. It was as if I didn't exist.
Maybe he was deaf, I don't know, although there were no “deaf children at play” signs on the street. After collecting myself and calming my emotions from the ensuing panic attack that I immediately experienced, I drove on. When I looked in my rearview mirror, he was still in the middle of the road on his bike, this time with another kid talking to him.
I assume that the other kid saw the kid on the bike almost get hit by a car.
12. What a Rat!
I had an abusive stepfather when I was a kid. When I say abusive, I mean things like beatings, gaslighting, manipulation, and many other varieties of psychological and physical abuse. I hated him more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life, and one night it came to a horrifying turning point. I decided to make rat poison tea to give him. But then, when I tried to make it, it turned out that the rat poison we had in our house would not dissolve in the tea.
It’s for the best. He’s still a terrible person, but at least I’m not a murderer.
13. A Screwy Situation
I once grabbed a screwdriver in a desperate attempt to stop my ex-husband from pinning me down and strangling me. I wildly swung the thing up in the air and only put a hole in his shirt, not even touching his body at all. I honestly really wish that I hadn't missed. That man was pure evil and would’ve deserved whatever he would’ve gotten.
14. Don’t Mess with This Guy’s Mom!
My mom was in an abusive relationship for about eight years. About six years into it, my ex and I stopped by to pick her up one night, as she called us and said that the guy was drunk and that she wanted to leave. We arrived and, as I approached the front steps, I looked up into the glass door and saw a pair of hands shoving my mother out of view.
She went flying. I raged out and grabbed an ax that was nearby. The dude would chop down trees on her property and sell bundled firewood. As soon as the guy stepped out of the house and came down the stairs towards me, I chased him around the perimeter of the property with the ax while almost blacking out in anger.
A buddy of his, who was staying with them temporarily, happened to have been standing around the side of the house smoking a cigarette. He tackled me as soon as he saw me come running by. Luckily, the ax didn’t penetrate my chest, seeing as I landed face down with it pinned right up against me. This could have been all types of messy in two ways.
Fast forward to about two years after this horrific incident. The abusive guy gets into an ugly car wreck and passes away. Just two months after that, I get into a similarly violent car crash on the exact same street as his, and in a similar truck; yet, I walked away with just cuts and bruises. Now that’s what I call justice from above!
15. Correcting the Records
I’m a nurse. My unit was very, very busy one day and I mentioned to a patient that we needed to start her on antibiotics. The patient consented. I then gave her penicillin, only to find out after the fact that our computer said she had an anaphylactic allergy to penicillin. I totally neglected to check her records before administering the medication. Yet, incredibly, a miracle happened. She must have outgrown her childhood allergy somehow because nothing happened to her after she took the medication.
Nevertheless, I still beat myself up for a long time over the fact that I had allowed such a near miss to have taken place. You can be sure that I won’t ever be making a mistake like that again…
16. The Cause of Her Concerns
When my younger sister was in middle school, she took a very sudden and unexplained dip at one point. Seemingly overnight, she went from being a bouncy, sunny kid who loved going outside and seeing her friends to kind of reserved and struggling to keep her grades up. Her friends stopped coming around, crazy rumors about her started, and she was just overall seeming really depressed and nervous all the time.
Our parents were very into the "just suck it up" mentality, so they told her to just push through and be better. I tried to get her to tell me what had happened, and she told me the same thing she told our parents: that kids at school were bullying her and that her friends were being mean. I didn't buy it, but there was nothing I could do about it at the time.
Then, one day at the dinner table, we were all talking about town gossip, as was our family’s custom, when my mom brought up how a teacher at my sister's school was looking for a hand in getting rid of some old furniture from his late father's house. She mentioned that she had volunteered the family to go over and help out that coming weekend.
My sister’s reaction was chilling. She immediately broke down into having sobs, howling at the top of her lungs as though someone had just died. You can probably guess where it all went from there. She confessed that the teacher's son, who was a sophomore when my sister was in seventh grade, had assaulted her.
When she tried to tell the teacher about it, he immediately shut her down, called her a liar, and threatened to fail her if she ever tried to tell anyone about it. I had to spend the following day in class with that monster while my parents sorted out how they were going to handle the situation. Believe me when I say it took everything I had not to lose my cool on this kid.
I am not a violent person by nature, but I had to sit there with him a foot away and all I could think about was smashing his face into the tiles until the light left his eyes. That was over ten years ago and he's in jail now, but I think I'd still have to fight to contain myself if I was ever in the same room as him again.
17. Looking for Help
My mother was dying in hospice. It was undignified and she was in a lot of pain, but she was still fully lucid and alert. At one point, I asked her if she wanted me to help her speed things up. For context, she had been a nurse before she got sick and I knew what I could do to make things happen if she wanted them to.
She told me that she wished I could, but that she didn’t want me to get in trouble or go to jail for something like that. We laughed about this for a little bit, and I maintained that I would have a ball in jail. She passed later that week. I spent most of those days by her side. After this experience, I am now 100% in favor of physician-assisted euthanasia.
Watching her go like that was absolutely torturous.
18. This Was No Walk in the Park
When I was about 14 years old or so, I was on a swing at the park one afternoon. I was going about as high and fast as that swing could possibly go. Then, all of a sudden, a kid who couldn’t have been older than two wandered directly in front of me just as I was coming down. I slammed my feet on the ground as hard as I could in order to avoid crashing into her.
I managed to stop myself about an inch before I hit this little kid’s body. My hands started to bleed from squeezing the swing’s chain, but at least I didn’t drop-kick a two-year-old all the way across the park. The mother saw the whole thing happen, but she was too far away from us to do anything about it at the moment.
She immediately ran over crying and thanked me profusely for stopping.
19. Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire
I once accidentally started a grease fire in a pot on the stove while cooking for a date. Panic quickly set in, as it was kind of a big fire. The only thing I could think of to put it out with was baking soda. That’s what they taught us in school, right? So I ransacked my cupboards, but couldn't find any. Next best thing that came to mind? Dirt.
So I ran outside to grab some dirt and told my date not to pour water on the fire. I promised her I would be right back. As I'm out there, I suddenly hear her scream and see a huge flash of orange. My heart sank and I froze for a second. Did I just kill my date??? Thankfully, once I was back inside, I saw that she was totally fine.
I come barging into the room to see that the fire is now smaller, but still going. I also see that my walls and ceiling are completely scorched. Naturally, I ask her what happened. She replies that she poured milk on the fire because milk is thicker than water. After a long and confused pause on my part, I just responded with “Umm...okay.”
Anyway, when all was said and done, no one was harmed in this incident...except my bank account when my security deposit didn't cover the damages done when I moved out later. Oh well! The funny part is that I also have a few other fire stories from that apartment. I’m pretty sure my landlord thought I was an arsonist.
Either that or a dumb kid on his first time living alone, pretending to be an adult.
20. Fighting Back
Back when I was 13 years old, I spent some time living in a group home for a little while. The boys who lived in the group home were never allowed to go upstairs to where the girls’ dorms were. I was the only girl who left the premises each day to attend public school. Everyone else went to school in the basement.
Every day, as I would be the only one upstairs awake early in the morning, this one guy would always sneak up to our area and force himself on me. I told one of the house parents, and she just laughed at me. After a month of this going on, I finally snapped. I stood on top of my bed listening as his footsteps got closer and closer.
As soon as he walked into my room, I lunged at him. I wrapped my hands around his throat. As soon as he hit the ground, everyone in the group home came running to see what that sound had been. It took several people to pry my hands off of that guy’s throat. The cops brought me down and initially charged with attempting to take his life.
Luckily, that kid eventually confessed to what he had been doing. I was still charged with assault and battery, though. I had to spend two months in a juvenile detention center. I was also given six months of house arrest and six months of probation. If those people hadn’t intervened, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have choked him until he stopped breathing that day.
21. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
I once accidentally leaned up against an unsteady bit of wall that my mother had warned me not to touch. It instantly fell and covered my little brother, who was only around three years old at the time. Surprisingly, he turned out to be mostly okay. He had a few broken bones and cuts, as well as a concussion, but the accident could very well have killed him; so we were very relieved.
22. A Hundred Pounds of Clay
I was out shooting clay pigeons at a gun range with my family one time. The group next to us decided to go up range without telling us, i.e. walked into the line of fire. I yelled “pull” and a clay pigeon was released. The pigeon flew over to what should have been a clear range. In reality, I ended up shooting the clay pigeon right over a stranger’s head.
The only injury he sustained was a small cut from a piece of rubble that fell on him when I shot the clay pigeon. But things could very easily have turned out much, much worse…
23. Falling Flat
A drunk college student once fell into the road right in front of me as I was driving along. I swerved, damaged two cars including my own, and injured my passenger. I myself was fine. The kid didn't even hang around to thank me, the little brat. As bad as that was in and of itself, the worst part came later, when I saw how people reacted to hearing about this incident.
The amount of sketchy goons who have tried to make compelling arguments to me as to why I should have just killed him is truly disgusting. I'm very, very happy with how things turned out and, as I’ve had to state many times, it was literally the most legal and safe thing that I could possibly have done under the circumstances, as was decided in court.
Some people out there are literally brainwashed to think that their personal property is worth more than a young human life, and that's honestly extremely disturbing. I'm glad that I grew up where I did and was taught the morals that I was because the world scares the heck out of me if you think I should have hurt some poor drunk kid in order to save some low-level criminal's new car.
24. A Dream That Didn’t Come True
I used to regularly contemplate putting ground up lead or ground glass into my horrible, abusive ex-husband's food. But, you know, I’ve heard tell that God frowns on things like that, so I decided not to go through with it. If not for that one factor, he'd have probably been dead before our second anniversary.
25. Free Fallin’
When my daughter was just seven weeks old, I was going out to the coffee shop around the block from my house. It was a rainy day, but the rain had stopped briefly. I put her in my Moby Wrap pouch and went out. I went and got a coffee and a sandwich. On my way back home, I went to step up onto the sidewalk. Instead, my toe clipped the curb.
I tripped and fell forward. My daughter was thrown out of the wrap and onto the sidewalk. Luckily, I was closer to the ground when it happened as I was falling as well, and the fall wasn’t as far as it could have been. She began to cry immediately and all I could do was sit there on the wet sidewalk, rocking her back and forth while a woman was standing next to me shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!”
I didn’t have my cell phone with me because I was just running out. A kind gentleman let me use his and I called my husband who was working around the block. He was there in seconds. We went to the emergency room and got lots of tests done. I watched as my seven-week-old daughter was placed in a CT scan, and I felt so helpless.
Thankfully, she turned out to be completely fine. Nevertheless, that was the worst day of my life. I can still close my eyes and see her falling to the ground. Although this experience was terrifying, it taught me some important lessons: that kids are resilient; that if they cry immediately then they’re probably okay and that if they move immediately then they’re probably okay.
Another valuable lesson was that you’re gonna screw things up as a parent from time to time no matter what, so don’t be too hard on yourself.
26. Open Sesame
One time, by accident, I almost squished my brother to death with our garage door. He was crawling under it and I pressed the button to close it too early. Obviously, he then got stuck under it and I started slamming the button in a panic. Thankfully, after several attempts, the thing eventually started to open and he was okay.
27. Screaming for Ice Cream
While working at a fast-food shop, my friend who was highly allergic to peanuts once came in and asked me for our shop's version of the Blizzard. I joked, "You want that with a peanut butter cup, right? Hahaha!" We both chuckled before he said no, and asked for one with cookie dough instead. For some unspeakable and inexplicable reason, of which I have not a single clue as to why, I made it for him with cookie dough and peanut butter cups.
I handed it to him without a second thought. He brought it back less than a minute later and said he thought he saw a peanut butter cup in it. I took a look and, sure enough, my dumb teenage self had put this man’s literal death poison into his ice cream. I must have apologized no less than 100 times. He said it wasn't a big deal, but I lived with the anxiety of knowing that I almost killed him for a while.
28. Fifth Time’s the Charm
My wonderful and beloved husband had several brain tumors and died a horrible, painful death after a long period of suffering. After he passed, shortly before our 25th anniversary, five different people told me how “lucky” I was to be a widow, and not divorced like them. After hearing that for the fifth time, I absolutely lost it…
29. A Terrible Memory
My ex was abusive to me and I couldn’t find a way out, so I considered trying to hurt him. Eventually, a professional convinced me that I could leave him if I wasn’t happy. I don’t think I would have actually gone through with it, but it still freaks me out to this day that I once reached the point where I could even dream of thinking like that.
30. Poor Taste
I once gave my then-four-year-old cousin a candy that got stuck in his throat. All the kids started freaking out and, when the adults realized that something was up in the kitchen, full-blown chaos ensued. I remember someone holding him upside down by his legs, and a lot of crying and screaming. Luckily, our neighbor was a nurse.
She rushed over and rescued him before it was too late.
31. Respecting Your Elders
My grandma got moved into a real shady nursing home. Her concierge doctor, to whom she paid $3,000 a year specifically to stay a patient of, refused to go anywhere except this one nursing home—and this one nursing home was a piece of garbage. The very first day that we went to visit her there, we found her covered in poop and pee.
Not one person came to check on her or answer her buzzers. They dropped her on the ground on day two, and she had to go to the hospital. We went to her room to pick up her stuff and found a nurse sitting in her chair and eating all her food. The next time one of our family members visited, they told us that her TV was missing and that it had been replaced by some low-quality small one.
That’s when I finally lost it. I thought to myself that if they had robbed her on top of everything else they had done, then I was going to kill those evil nurses. When I arrived, it turned out that the TV was fine and that my relative had just been overly hyped up and suspicious. The bad nurses did eventually get fired, and grandma had a decent time living there for the next few years.
32. Vigilante Justice
My best mate once got stabbed in the chest more than eight times in a row, and almost died. We set out on a hunt to catch the guy who did it. When we found him, we just beat the absolute daylights out of him. We delivered a lot of kicks to the head, but we eventually decided not to go through with stabbing him back, as we had originally planned to do.
33. The Last Straw
The person who I once almost hurt was my high school bully. After years of being tormented by him, I finally couldn’t take it anymore and decided that I’d had enough. I got violent and was ready to finish him off once and for all, but in the end I decided not to go through with it. To this day, I regret letting that evil man live.
34. This One’s Heavy
I operate heavy equipment (dozer excavators). These things weigh over 30 tons on the light side, for perspective. Anyway, we had just started a project and had just hired some new laborers to help. I used my two-way radio to ask them to come over to where I was to tear down a set of barricades so that I could proceed.
One of the laborers literally ran right up beside my machine without making any direct eye contact or radio contact with me at all. Needless to say, the industry standard is to communicate carefully with whoever is operating this kind of equipment while on the job, so that everyone involved can move around safely.
I was backing the machine up at the time, so I was only looking behind where I was. When I turned around to start going forward again, the laborer was literally no more than two inches away from my tracks. I have never pressed down on the engine decal pedal as fast or as hard as I did in that situation. If I had been new to this kind of machine or less experienced, the guy would have been an empty toothpaste roll on the ground.
Pxfuel
35. There’s No Place Like Home
Just today, I found out that my neighbor intentionally set his houseboat on fire for insurance money. When he did this, the fire spread over to my houseboat and there was a huge explosion. My entire home got burned to a crisp and both of my pet cats died. At the moment, repairmen are working on rebuilding the houseboat as best they can.
In the meantime, I am literally homeless for the entire foreseeable future. When I bumped into my former neighbor earlier today, I just totally lost my mind and beat him up. I hate that guy. He ruined my life.
36. A Bedtime Story
My roommate wanted to rearrange our dorm room back in college. We had bunk beds. I suggested that we go step by step and break the top bunk into pieces—i.e. take the mattress off, then the bottom spring bit, etc. She said "No, we got this. We can just pick it up as a whole unit." I told her I did not possess enough strength to do that. She told me it would be fine.
So, we lifted this bed up whole, straight off the bottom bed pegs. The height difference between us was over a foot. Because of this imbalance, I kinda dropped it trying to even it out with her end. Then, shock of all shocks, it ended up falling. She was backed against a windowsill. She tripped and fell back as a result.
Her head caught the windowsill and the bed came down on her. One of the legs caught the sill and her head ended up trapped between the bottom rung of the bed ladder and the windowsill. We had to yell our heads off and get some help. If that leg wouldn't have caught the windowsill, she would have had the entire weight of the bed unit come down onto her fully exposed neck.
This would surely have broken her neck, probably crushing her throat to pieces and who knows what else. Honestly, she was literally mere inches away from death. We both had to pause what we were doing at that point and just let that fact sink in for the rest of the night. The beds still got moved eventually, though.
37. One Wrong Turn Can Change Everything
I was working as a contractor way back in the day and was struggling to find an address on one particular occasion. I missed the turn and pulled into an apartment complex parking lot to turn around. I was going maybe three miles an hour through the parking lot and there was a row of parked cars directly to my right.
I was just passing those cars when, all of a sudden, completely out of nowhere, a little toddler wearing nothing but a diaper came darting out from between the parked cars and ran right into the path of my car. Fortunately, I was going slow enough that I was able to stop just shy of hitting him, maybe an inch or two away.
There was no parent anywhere in sight. I got out, picked the kid up, and finally found his “responsible adult” standing in the open doorway of their apartment around the corner, having a smoke and chatting on the phone. They couldn't even see the kid from their line of vision, not that they were making an effort to look for him anyway.
Had things gone just slightly differently than they did, I would have actually hit that kid that day. I would have had a lifetime of trauma to deal with from that moment on, and who knows exactly what kind of horrible fate that poor kid would have suffered. And all because his parents were jerks who couldn’t be bothered to take proper care of him.
38. Four Eyes Are Better Than Two
Once, while driving, I didn't notice another car coming directly towards me at a very high speed. I almost turned in front of it. My passenger pointed it out to me just in time. If he hadn’t done so, we would have been hit and the car would have been wrecked. My passenger almost certainly would have received the brunt of the impact, and probably would have been killed in all likelihood.
39. Just a Shot Away
I almost killed someone in the aftermath and in the midst of the most disturbing discovery I’ve ever experienced. I found out that my now ex-husband was having an affair with someone whom I had previously considered to be my best friend. Spoiler alert, she turned out not to be a friend at all. She would have me babysit her kids to keep me occupied while she was sleeping with my husband.
Extra spoiler alert, she wasn't the first one he cheated with. God, I was dumb back then! Shortly after I discovered all this, we were in his truck and having a vicious alcohol-fueled argument about it. He was about to get violent with me. He tried to grab me several times and was clearly going to hit me. Extra extra spoiler, this would not have been the first time he had done so…
I pulled out my .22 handgun (semi-auto) from my coat pocket and held it up to his head. I seriously considered just ending his life in that moment. His attitude then very quickly changed from violent and aggressive to “Woah, woah, woah, let’s not do anything too crazy here.” After a few seconds, I decided that he wasn’t worth it.
I decided that I had better things to do with my life. I also had people (i.e. our family and children) who depended on me. He backed off. So, I shot the gun into the ground out of my window. That felt good and released the anger I was feeling into the innocent dirt. I got out of the truck and told him to never come back.
When I got home, I dumped all of his stuff out onto the yard and changed the locks on all the doors. That was about 32 years ago. It turned out to be the best decision that I ever made. I divorced that loser and didn't kill him. Today, I am doing great. I got remarried to a wonderful man who is actually a normal human being.
My new husband treats me well. He respects and supports all of my endeavors, as I do for all of his. We are still in love after 28 years of marriage. I realized that I didn't know what a good marriage or relationship was until I finally found one. Why did I wait so long? Don't know.
40. Out to Lunch
When my son was two years old, we were driving through the Middle of Nowhere, Texas because we were moving across the country. We gave him a hot dog to eat in the back seat, which was probably a terrible idea in hindsight. He immediately started choking on it. I had to jump into the back seat and finger sweep it out of his throat while my wife took the wheel and drove.
That experience was utterly terrifying.
41. The Wrong Thing to Say
Literally just a couple of days after my mother had passed, a guy decided to make fun of me over it. He yelled out a yo’ mamma joke, with the punchlines being "She's dead." I snapped. Everything went red. I don't remember what led to it, but the next thing I remember is holding the guy at arm's length by the collar, with him crying and crawling at my arms screaming something.
What I realized next was that I was holding him in the middle of the road, with a bus quickly approaching. Luckily, something switched back on in my head and I pulled the guy and myself away from the road just before the bus would have hit him. Back on the sidewalk, I dropped him onto the ground and stood over him for a bit.
I walked home feeling numb and, for the next couple of weeks, I barely spoke to anyone or ate, while isolating myself to my room. I’ve bumped into the guy a few times as the years went by. Every time he sees me, he always just walks away as quickly as he can. And I always just feel weird about the whole thing.
42. Betrayal
The person that I almost killed was my older brother. It was after my mother had passed and I was working three jobs so that my older brother and two younger brothers could carry on with their studies and make something of themselves. Four years into this whole arrangement, I made an utterly chilling discovery.
I found out that instead of him paying the bills with the money I was giving him every week, he was taking out debt in my name to buy stuff for himself. I had been giving him more than enough for all of our bills, yet they were not being paid. After four years of working my butt off at three different jobs non-stop, I suddenly discovered that I was more than $100,000 in debt, with no money left in my bank account.
And this was all the fault of the brother that I had been doing it all for. Imagine how devastated I was feeling at the moment when I first learned that this had been going on. The only reason that he did not die that day was that too many people got in the way and stopped me from carrying out what I wanted to do.
I have never wanted to hurt anyone in my life other than that piece of trash.
43. Getting Stepped On
Believe it or not, there was a point in my life when I seriously contemplated trying to kill my emotionally abusive stepfather. I just felt like I had taken enough of his garbage and couldn’t deal with it anymore. Thankfully, I didn't kill him in the end, and everything became better after I grew up and moved out.
44. Grandma’s House, or the Big Bad Wolf?
I spent several months living with a narcissistic, vile, evil to the core grandmother. This woman never slowed down or let up on anything. She spoke constantly, dribbled on about whatever she wanted non-stop, and we were living in a very small house so there was no getting away from it. I found out that, among many other things, she had been saying really horrible things about me behind my back.
Anyway, one day it all just became too much to handle. She was non-stop talking and talking about nothing, and I just wanted a moment of peace. So, I got up and walked over to the kitchen. She started yelling out to me from the lounge. I just stood there in the kitchen, hands on the sink, eyes closed, for probably at least five minutes as her voice continued to echo in the background.
Eventually, I decided that I’d had enough. I picked up a knife. I'll be completely honest. At that moment, I was going to kill her. There was no doubt about it in my mind. The only thing that stopped me was the idea of having to waste my life in prison over someone like her. That thought was enough to make me put the knife down.
I took a few deep breaths and then walked back into the living room. I know it's not a great look for me, but please don't envision this woman as some sweet old lady sitting in a rocky chair just wanting to talk. No, she is still to this day the worst person I have ever met. She is toxic on a fundamental level. She just sends people to their absolute limits with no remorse.
45. Switching Things Up
I once noticed that some guy on the street was eyeing me. He then started to walk towards me. He literally changed directions and was coming up behind me in my blind spot. I pulled out my switchblade and held it up for him to see. He immediately started walking away. I guess that’s the closest I ever came to killing someone.
46. Follow the Leader
There was one guy at my old high school who I always hated. He actively bullied my friends for years and, one day, I followed him home to learn when he would be alone so that I could shoot him with no one seeing. I never went through with it, but I was pretty close. Last I heard, he was in prison.
47. Not Enough Beddy Bye
I once got into a car accident because I fell asleep at the wheel. I was fine. Well, at least I felt fine physically. One minute I was struggling to stay awake while driving and then, next thing I know, my car is rolling down a steep incline into a deep ditch on the opposite side of the road. Thank Christ that no one was coming the other way.
I was apparently going slow enough that someone coming from the other direction would have had enough time to slow down and watch me crash—or hit their horn to try and wake me up—but there is also the flip side that they might not have had enough time to react, and I could have seriously hurt or killed either myself or someone else.
Do not drive if you’re tired, people! Just pull over and nap if you’ve already started driving. Otherwise, stay home if it’s not absolutely necessary for you to go out. Stay a few extra hours where you are and sleep, if possible. You will never regret it...but you very well might regret not doing so.
48. Temper Tantrum
When I was 13 years old, I once pulled a knife on my dad during a heated argument. I was only a small teenager, so I’m not sure if I would have been able to successfully kill my much bigger dad, but at that moment I definitely intended to. Your brain can get seriously messed up at that age, and I’m lucky that my rage didn’t win out that day and destroy my life.
49. The Times They Are a-Changin'
In high school, I once caught an especially bad earful from one of my bullies and he embarrassed me in front of our entire class. I swear I could have choked the life out of him right then and there without batting an eye. But life is funny. We're now best friends (12 years later) and we talk on the phone at least twice a week for an hour minimum.
50. Right Place, Right Time
This is a crazy story, but here goes. Once, I was in a gas station to buy some coffee. The customer in front of me started arguing with the clerk, claiming that he gave him the wrong change. Things quickly escalated and the customer pulled out brass knuckles with a blade on them. He threatened to kill the clerk.
I told him to put the knuckles away, and he promptly told me screw off. I calmly put my coffee down on a shelf next to me, lifted my shirt, and put my hand on my pistol. I’m not a cop or anything, just a responsible permit holder. The guy saw my hand on the gun, took his blade off, and immediately ran out of the building. I was literally shaking when I went up to pay for my coffee. It felt like something out of a movie.
The funny thing was that the clerk still made me pay for my coffee after that!
51. The Assassin
I tried to poison my mom's boyfriend. I was probably around 11 years old. I had one of those science kits from the Scholastic book fair. I took the citric acid and dumped the whole container into his drink. He sipped it and just said, "this tastes like trash" and dumped it out.
52. Always Check the Decimals
I very nearly injected a premature baby who had Down Syndrome with ten times the amount of Lasix I was supposed to give him: I had put the decimal in the wrong place when I did the math on the dose. That baby would almost certainly have died if I'd given it to him. I had the liquid drawn up in the syringe and had the syringe actually in the port ready to push through before I looked inside the chamber and realised how uncharacteristically full it seemed.
Paediatric IV doses of anything are simply tiny. I was supposed to give him 0.1 mls, and nearly gave him 1.0mls. I needed a very large cup of tea after that.
Public Domain Pictures
Sources: Reddit,
