Talk About a Week of Tragedies

So I was watching a documentary on the History Channel last week about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was showing on April 15, the day Lincoln was killed. Have read something the previous day about another tragedy that happened in history, it got me curious and I started looking at dates from last week. It was scary how many tragic events happened within the same week throughout history.

I started by looking at April 12. Back in 1945, World War II was starting to come to an end. The U.S. was led throughout the entire war by one of the best Presidents in history. But on April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage and never got the chance to see the end of the war. He also never got a chance to see a booming post-war U.S. that he helped rejuvenate after the depression.

The next day, April 13, marked another somewhat tragic event in U.S. history, although this one ended happily. In 1970, Apollo 13 was in flight to the moon when there was an explosion on the spacecraft that nearly ended the lives of three astronauts. I'm sure most people have seen the movie with Tom Hanks, so we all know the story and how they made it back, but it was on April 13 that the near explosion occurred.

April 14 was the next day that marked a tragic world event. In the late night hours on that date back in 1912, the RMS Titanic struck a large iceberg in the North Atlantic and later sunk, killing over 1,500 passengers. The ship didn't actually sink until the early morning hours of the next day, April 15, but it started with hitting that iceberg on the night of April 14.

As I mentioned earlier, April 15 was the day that Abraham Lincoln died. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth on the evening of April 14, and died the following morning. Sort of like the Titanic, the event took place the night before, and the tragedy occurred the next day. One of the two best President's in U.S. history, Lincoln was the first U.S. President to be assassinated and brought our country through the Civil War and kept in intact.

In 2007,on April 16, a student at Virginia Tech went on a shooting spree, killing 32 people before taking his own life. It marked the deadliest peace time shooting incident by a single gunman in United States history.

On April 17, tragedy rested. But only for a day.

On April 18, the people of San Francisco were awakened in the pre-dawn hours to a major earthquake. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was felt as far north as Oregon and as far inland as Nevada, and was estimated to have killed over 3,000 people.

The next day, and nearly 90 years later, Oklahoma City was the victim of a domestic attack when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building. The April 19, 1995, bombing claimed the lives of 168 people, including 19 children who wer eat a daycare in the building.

Four years and one day later, on April 20, 12 students and one teacher were killed and 21 others were injured when two students went on a shooting spree at Columbine High School.

All in all, that's a pretty rough week of tragic events. Some involved big name politicians, others involved everyday, ordinary people. I just found it odd that all of these events took place during the same one-week time period in April.