S066 - Dearborn, Henry David "Dave" [DECEASED]

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Name: Henry David "Dave" Dearborn
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: 12
School: John Endecott Memorial Academy
Hobbies and Interests: Singing and songwriting, video games, LARP, American politics

Appearance: Dave Dearborn stands at 6’2” (189 centimeters) tall and weighs 180 pounds. He has a rhomboid body shape, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. His body has a moderate amount of muscle tone, most of which is concentrated around his upper torso instead of his legs. He has scarring on the back of his left hand and his left arm. His skin is fair but not pallid, and his arms, legs, and chest have patches of dark body hair.

He has a diamond-shaped face with dark brown deep-set eyes, high-arched eyebrows, a turned-up nose, bow-shaped lips, and a slightly protruding chin. He has a large, jagged scar that starts in the center of his forehead and reaches all the way to his left ear, as well as several smaller scars that resemble deep scratches across the outer side of his left arm and hand. As a result, he styles his hair in a medium-length taper fade haircut and generally stays away from short sleeves in order to draw the eyes away from the scarring. The hair itself is black and somewhat wavy, with a few premature streaks of grey. He has an easy smile, a slight underbite, and a stubbly chin.

Despite his imposing appearance, his speaking voice is rather high-pitched and gentle, with a singing voice firmly in the tenor range.

Dave’s fashion sense is a mix of rebellious and conservative, featuring elements of both preppy and punk fashion. This includes tartan shirts, distressed jeans, madras, sweaters, Doc Martens, slip-on shoes, and a black leather jacket he is especially taken with wearing during the fall months. On the day of the abduction, he was wearing a pair of Doc Marten Coronado shoes, dark wash jeans with torn knees, a dark green tartan shirt over a white undershirt, his leather jacket, and a dark grey puffer coat.

Biography: Dave was born to Peter and Patricia Dearborn on October 5, 2003. Peter works as an ordained minister for the Wesley Methodist Church in Salem, while Patricia works as an alternative energy research engineer in nearby Beverly, Massachusetts. The Dearborn family also had a daughter, Melissa Dearborn, in 1998.

Dave’s name was the byproduct of a minor marital dispute: Peter wanted to name the boy Henry after the famous General Dearborn, while Patricia preferred David, as she thought the alliteration sounded better. They eventually compromised by the time their son was born, using both names as a nod to the writer Henry David Thoreau. As a boy, he preferred to use his full middle name, making the switch from “David” to “Dave” in high school in a bid to make himself appear more mature.

Peter and Patricia’s high-paying jobs enabled Dave and Melissa to live a comfortable upper middle-class lifestyle. As a pastor, Peter did everything under his power to provide both Dearborn children with a strong Christian education; as a result, they were each enrolled in the Covenant Christian Academy, a prestigious private school accepting students from preschool age all the way to twelfth grade, as soon as they were eligible for admission. Outside of school, the siblings were asked to attend Sunday classes at Peter’s church and sing in the children’s choir. The latter activity instilled a lifelong love of music in the younger Dearborn, who was soon noted for his beautiful soprano as he sang along to holy hymns and Disney villain anthems alike.

While his sister quickly grew into an outgoing, extraverted girl who dreaded the boredom of attending church, David Dearborn was comparatively quiet, nerdy, and devout when he wasn’t singing. He kept the handful of friends he was able to make at Covenant very close, clinging the closest to fellow bookworm Keith Bassett. The two boys met when they were both in third grade, spending most of the year as bitter rivals that competed with each other on everything from test scores to memorizing song lyrics. It took a fistfight between them towards the end of that year for them to realize they had far more in common than not, but once the rivalry between them settled, Dearborn and Bassett quickly became the very best of friends. From then on, there was hardly a week where they weren’t spending time at one another’s houses.

When Dave was in fifth grade, Keith received a copy of the new fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons for his birthday and invited a few of his close friends to start a campaign with him in lieu of throwing a party. With Keith’s older brother Neil serving as Dungeon Master, Dave embarked on a fantasy roleplay adventure for the first time in his young life. His first character was a bard. Unfortunately, due to the various controversies surrounding the game, Peter and Patricia grounded Dave for three weeks after he blurted out what had happened at the party on the car ride home. Peter was particularly upset with his son, for he feared that the boy might have inadvertently acted against the Methodist faith by playing a game so associated with the Devil back in the 1980s.

From then on, Dave was no longer permitted to visit the Bassetts’ home, and all of his interactions with Keith outside of school were closely supervised. He resented his parents’ decision for the very first time, as he could see nothing problematic with his D&D experience and felt he was being treated like Melissa, who had lapsed into more or less open rebellion against the Dearborn family rules by staying out past curfew and developing crushes on boys.

Dave’s relationship with his sister was a complicated but ultimately loving one. While the siblings cared for one another deeply, Melissa considered her younger brother a stick-in-the-mud and frequently tried encouraging him to stray from his comfort zone for fear that he might stay under Peter and Patricia’s thumb until he graduated. For example, she encouraged her brother to rebel by listening to verboten genres of music, such as hip-hop and metal. She would frequently rope her friends, Heather Frost and Elizabeth Powell, into helping her; for example, the three girls once took a sixth-grade Dave to the mall in order to help him overhaul his wardrobe in preparation for Logic School, Covenant’s grade 7 and 8 equivalent of middle school. Dave frequently worried that Melissa’s antics would earn their parents’ ire, which they often did. Nevertheless, she always had Dave’s best interests at heart, and he considered her akin to a second mother.

Following the incident at the Bassetts’, Melissa was determined to provide Dave with the roleplaying experience he now sorely missed. After researching during her spare time, she leaned on the less strict Patricia to sign Dave up for the LARP Adventure Program, a nearby summer camp offering the real-life equivalent of D&D to children and teenagers. Though it also offered opportunities to play the game, Melissa backed up her recommendation with studies extolling the benefits of letting children LARP, and Patricia reluctantly backed down from Peter’s consensus and agreed. The summer before his sixth-grade year, Dave was enrolled. Keeping the D&D-esque mechanics of LARP (and occasional campaigns taking place at the camp) secret from his father, he found himself surprisingly immersed — both in constructing props and in learning the martial arts required for a successful LARP. His experience at LARP camp marked the first time he ever enjoyed physical activity. This started spilling over into his out-of-character personality as well: after taking a shine to playing as rangers instead of bards, he developed a keen interest in archery. To that end, and to help arm himself against future teasing, he began to exercise. Patricia encouraged this, hoping to see her weedy, unathletic son grow up strong.

Initially, Dave had managed to keep the nature of LARP camp a secret from his father with vague, evasive answers that focused more on the exercise and camaraderie than the actual roleplaying aspects of the camp. Peter quickly grew suspicious. One Friday morning, he found a character sheet in his son’s room and flew into a rage, confronting Dave with the evidence when he returned home from camp. The entire Dearborn family became involved in the dispute, as Melissa had suggested the camp and Patricia had worked to keep its true nature from Peter. In his capacity as the patriarch of the Dearborn family, Peter telephoned the camp and unenrolled Dave for the last three weeks he was scheduled to attend. The action was met with much controversy from his wife and children, but he stood firmly by his decision.

In lieu of roleplaying with his newfound friends at LARP camp, Dave spent the rest of that summer studying for sixth grade, filling out his summer math packet and other such assignments. To pass the time, he amused himself with Flash games online, which he first discovered on the website Coolmath while trying to solve a challenging pre-algebra problem. From there, he quickly branched out to websites explicitly designed for online gaming, such as OneMoreLevel, Not Doppler, and finally Newgrounds. These websites were blocked by Covenant’s servers, so after the school year began, Dave satisfied his newfound love of games by borrowing Melissa’s old Nintendo DS and Wii after classes let out. He limited himself to two hours of gaming per weekday; his standards were more relaxed on weekends, much to his parents’ chagrin.

Towards the end of the 2015-16 school year, tragedy struck. Although Melissa was supposed to have been babysitting Dave one May evening, she allowed him to tag along with her, Heather, and Elizabeth to a party. The three girls took turns supervising him throughout the night. However, they had each imbibed alcohol, and when it came time to drive themselves and Dave home, they travelled on a freeway at well above the speed limit. This resulted in a serious accident, which killed Melissa and Elizabeth instantly and sent both Heather and Dave to the hospital. Although he survived the crash thanks to his seatbelt, a rear window shattered next to him and left him with various wounds from the explosion of glass. He was also knocked unconscious from the impact and blood loss, and he broke his left arm.

Following the deadly crash, Dave was sent back to school the week after he was discharged from the hospital. Yet his life was completely upended: his parents, beside themselves with grief, stopped talking with him; Patricia shut herself up in her room to mourn for several days, and Peter simply drifted further apart from his son as he continued to perform his holy duties. Left with physical and psychological scars, Dave became sullen and irritable, and he was plagued with recurring nightmares of the crash that ruined his sleep schedule. Afraid of losing both of her children, Patricia arranged appointments between Dave and a grief counselor for the rest of the year.

While Dave was undergoing counseling, Covenant offered him little reprieve from his trauma: due to the length of his stay, he had fallen behind in his studies, and a few of his classmates began to tease and ostracize him as a result of the accident. When one persistent bully, Eric Richardson, deliberately inflamed him by telling him he caused his sister’s death, Dave flew into a rage and punched Eric hard enough with his remaining arm to get the two of them suspended for fighting. For the rest of his days at Covenant, he was branded a social pariah. Even Keith no longer wanted anything to do with him. In place of his friends from school, Dave struck up conversations with kids he met at LARP camp. When he confided this in Patricia, she successfully negotiated with Peter to re-enroll him in the camp that summer, where Dave returned to his previous role as the Dearborn family’s happy, studious son. As a result, Peter begrudgingly admitted that the camp had merit.

Throughout all of this, Dave experienced a temporary crisis of faith. Why had God spared him and not his sister, who had never committed any crime save the usual teenage rebellion and underage drinking? Why should He punish Dave for the act of surviving a car crash? The middle-schooler pondered these questions for many months, listening to sad ballads and sacrilegious guitar solos alike to help him through the grieving process. Throughout his seventh-grade year, he began channeling his thoughts into concepts for original songs. Though he was less than proficient at playing actual instruments, he was nonetheless able to rely on his voice, and he taught himself how to use music production software to create backing tracks. By the end of his eighth-grade year, he released his first EP, Tales from the Interstate, which was dedicated to Melissa.

With Dave voicing his increasing dissatisfaction with Covenant’s learning environment and with medical bills and counseling fees mounting, the Dearborns thought it wise to pull their son from the academy following his graduation from the Logic School. He was enrolled at John Endecott Memorial High School beginning in his freshman year. That summer, he set about reinventing his image, adding a slew of punk-styled clothing to his staid wardrobe despite Peter’s protests. When he finally entered the school, he was quickly drawn to the Body Improvement Club; prior to high school, Dave had little experience with sports outside of LARP camp and yearly trips to the archery range, and he wanted to develop an exercise routine solid enough to leave his weaker middle school self behind. These efforts were largely successful, as he took to the club with an almost religious fervor. He now considers Body Improvement Club meetings more beneficial to him than John Endecott’s actual physical education classes.

Given Peter Dearborn’s position as an important member of the community, family discussions in the Dearborn household frequently involved American politics. Dave felt this was one of the few times he could truly connect with his parents following Melissa’s death, and he began following various news outlets online in order to impress them with his knowledge of politics. He describes his political views as conservative but moderate, supporting then-President Canon but drawing the line at his more extreme policy proposals. During his freshman year, Dave attempted to join the John Endecott debate team in an attempt to meet more politically active students, but he quickly proved himself ill-prepared and rash when faced with an actual debate. He quit the following year out of wounded pride, though he does not regret his time with the debate team. Following his departure from the club, Dave sought political discussions elsewhere. Currently, he sits in on the Young Republicans’ meetings whenever he feels particularly irked about the state of American politics.

Aside from his budding interest in politics, Dave has continued indulging his love of music, both in and out of school. Joining the John Endecott Memorial High School chorus in his freshman year, he quickly impressed Mr. Keir with his strong tenor voice and looked forward to every rehearsal. In his spare time, he continued to write his own songs: he released his very first album, Born Yesterday, midway through his sophomore year. During the coronavirus pandemic, he took up the guitar, with plans to release a second, guitar-focused album called Plague of Locusts by the end of his senior year. Those outside his usual friend group received their first exposure to his music when he tried to ask the glamorous Danielle Bird to homecoming with a short piece he'd composed. He was rejected, and succeeded only in making a spectacle of himself. As a result, he became too embarrassed to discuss this hobby in public, though he is still willing to share his work with interested friends.

As John Endecott was a secular school far removed from Covenant’s Christian teachings, Dave reluctantly joined the Worship and Prayer Club in an effort not to completely lose his connection to the Methodist faith. What he found was a close-knit, welcoming community, and this soon reaffirmed his devotion to the Lord. By the time of his senior year, he was promoted to Vice President of the club, his most important leadership role. On Sundays, he began volunteering for his father’s church as an usher; this was done partially out of love for the church and partially to pad his college applications.

Dave has continued to attend LARP camp throughout high school, now at the age where he writes campaigns of his own for younger campers. While his songwriting is much beloved, his trauma has made him extremely overprotective of the children under his watch, as he does not wish to lose any of them to unforeseen accidents. Because of this, the children sometimes accuse him of being a killjoy, and he is one of the less popular campaign organizers overall. In the event that he joins another LARPer’s campaign, he typically plays rangers or paladins. As a paladin, he has a beginner’s grasp of historical European martial arts. He has an especially soft spot for playing rangers, however, because the class allows him to practice archery; he no longer feels safe enough in a moving vehicle to take the hour-long car ride to the local archery range.

Despite his various commitments outside of school, Dave performs admirably in his classes, with his grades typically hovering in the A-minus to B-plus range. He credits his success to a strong work ethic and faith in God. He is currently considering two potential plans for the future: attending the most selective college he can that will allow him to express his faith, and attending a dedicated music school to help him bring his songwriting to the next level.

Advantages: Dave has solid hand-eye coordination and a bit of martial arts experience thanks to his time at LARP camp, and his time with the Body Improvement Club translates to better-than-average physical strength as well. His archery experience and gaming prowess further bolster this — especially the former, which would make him a more accurate shot than most if he is given a ranged weapon.
Disadvantages: Dave is generally a soft-spoken young man, which may make it difficult for him to find allies when coupled with his intimidating appearance. He is also deeply traumatized from the car accident that killed his sister, making him very cautious and protective of others even when this behavior would be considered unreasonable. Should a given situation stir up traumatic flashbacks in him, he is likely to turn extremely rash and aggressive; such an outburst may even cause him to become physically violent.

Designated Number: Student No. 066

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Designated Weapon: Date machete

Conclusion: I'm taking this one so Baines can't turn it into some kind of "Who's On First" bullshit with Dave and Date and- oh, whatever. Sunday school kids go one of two ways here. You look like you could be the type that isn't immediately slaughtered. Don't disappoint. - Matt Richards