High school is meant to be a time to make friends, not have them taken from you.
Opening up to TV WEEK, The Bachelorette contestant Sam Cochrane recalls the moment he found out one of his mates had been shot and killed at a party when he was just 13 years old.
“It was really shocking,” the NSW voiceover artist recalls.
“As a grown man now, I look back and think that’s not something a kid is supposed to be able to process.”
Sam, 31, was not at the party in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, at the time.
But he says he has struggled to forget losing a close friend so tragically.
“It’s stuck with me forever,” he says.
“We all experience tragedy, I suppose, but that sort of tragedy was very brutal and raw.
“The culprit was much older, and I believe it was over a girl, but we never really found out.”
Sam at age 14.
Sam says that at that age, the incident was “an eye-opening experience that created a really powerful adhesive among everyone”.
“There’s a painful memory there, of course,” he explains. “But the other memory I’ll never forget is the bunch of us young boys sort of glued together.”
