Just a couple of weeks ago, Billy Mashburn discussed with The Smoky Mountain News his continued goals and vision for his hometown of Franklin.

Taken too soon.

It’s the three words one person — let alone one family or one community — never wants to here when it comes to a young person passing away before they could blossom and take over the world, usually with a signature smile or laugh (or both).

A late-night shooting near the Western Carolina University campus Friday, Oct. 6, has left a student dead.

Tom Petty.

I can’t remember a time without him and his band’s music in my life. It’s always been there, just like Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson have always been there for my parents’ generation. I grew up on the sounds of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. We all did. Every single one of us, whether we realize it or not.

The attraction between people and waterfalls is nothing new, with a couple waterfall deaths per year typical between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Pisgah-Nantahala National Forest. 

ALSO: Herculean rescue effort at Yellowstone Falls highlights dangers of waterfall play

The 911 call, coming from a gorge cut high in the Balsam Mountains, was nearly unintelligible. When the connection ended five minutes later, Haywood County Emergency Management was left with two important facts: somebody had fallen from a waterfall, and the caller was saying something that sounded like “Yellowstone.”

SEE ALSO: WNC's deadliest waterfalls

The GPS coordinates showed the call originating in Dark Prong, two drainages over from Yellowstone Falls in the Pisgah National Forest’s Shining Rock Wilderness, but GPS data isn’t always correct in the rugged terrain of Western North Carolina. In the mountains, cell reception is often scant at best — emergency responders had to make a judgment call.

This one? This one hurt.

When I heard Thursday afternoon about the tragic suicide of Chester Bennington, lead singer for Linkin Park, I was taken back, as if someone had punched me in the chest. Suddenly, dozens of memories started flooding my field-of-vision. I remember listening to their groundbreaking mix of hard rock and hip-hop in middle school, seeing them in Montreal in high school, and always blasting their melodies before track-and-field meets all throughout my adolescence and early adulthood.

The roaring of the plane engine shook me awake.

Coasting into the skies over Newark, New Jersey, the flight was headed to Knoxville, then it was another hour-and-a-half car ride back to Waynesville. It had been a long week, and an even longer year, as I sipped my screwdriver and got lost in my thoughts.

An 83-year-old women died after falling 150 feet from an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Graveyard Fields in Haywood County last Friday (May 19).

I’ve tried hard to keep grief out of my columns lately. There’s only so much melancholy and broken-heartedness readers can take when reading the weekly paper over a cup of coffee. But with this Sunday being Mother’s Day, I couldn’t help but write a little about my own mom today.