death and the student body

One of my students is convinced she will die soon. She was mostly joking, but the students have been discussing death more and more recently. The biggest reason behind this is because, in the last month, three students have died or been involved in causing someone's death.
The first was a kid I didn't have who was shot in his neighborhood. I have a lot of students who were friends with this student and teachers who had him as a student that really admired how hard he was trying to make something of himself, despite his past.
The second was an incident that happened right before school came back from break. Most of my students kept talking about a 17 year old Crip that shot a 21 year old Blood three times in front of a Game Stop in the middle of the day. One of my students even lived right behind the Game Stop. During 7th bell last week, I finally got the name of the 17 year old kid after hearing about it all day. He was one of my students, one that was in my class until he beat the living daylights out of another kid (who also happened to be one of my students). They kicked him out of Granby much too gladly. The students in my 4th bell were discussing it today, since, for possibly the first time ever, I knew something before they did. One student said, "I can't believe we were in class with a murderer!", another was just completely shocked. The kid was strange, but used to be really good. It seemed like he needed to fit in, belong, prove something and now his ass is in jail from going way too far with it.
It's strange that they were talking about former-student, now-inmate today because the third death happened yesterday. I was updating my grades in the workroom and Rebecca mentioned to Laura that some of her students may not be in school or will be very distracted/upset because one of their good friends died. She mentioned the girl's name and it was a student I had last year in my 3rd bell. She was on homebound due to cancer (and, if I remember correctly, brain-related, possibly tumors), but came back during second semester. She was an amazing girl: incredibly intelligent, friendly, kind, hard-working, beautiful (she showed me some of her modeling pictures--they were amazing!) and funny. People are planning on wearing pink tomorrow for her.

It's been a strange start for 2008 in our school.