“Bbbut, he was an honor student!”
Everytime I hear that phrase attached to a crime victim, I think of Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which the journalist kept looking for a way to justify using the phrase to describe the kid run over by a car, and when a teacher said that he got into less trouble than the average kid in his crime-ridden school, called him an “honor student” in every article he wrote from that point onward.