Stamford Friends Help Musician Dru Barnes

Dru Barnes was a popular talented teen at Stamford’s Westhill High School back in the mid-1990s.

So popular, talented and attractive he was selected for a Seventeen magazine photo shoot featuring Westhill students, according to classmate Michelle Brady.

Barnes moved on from Stamford —where relatives still live. The musician is now based in Brooklyn and it is there in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood that he became the victim of a vicious assault about 10 a.m. July 11 at the hands of an attacker wielding a hammer. He became lost while heading home to the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, according to Huffington Post.

So severe were his injuries, the 34-year-old Barnes has lost his left eye and is facing several surgeries to repair the mutilation. The friend who Barnes had visited before the attack posted the news of the attack on Facebook with the Dru Barnes Healing Page. It is there that Brady and legions of Stamford friends learned of the attack and quickly moved to help him.

“He’s the worst person this could’ve happened to,” Brady said. “He always had a kind word for you. He wouldn’t ever have anything negative to say. This is really difficult for everybody to process.”

What isn’t difficult is that many of his friends are participating in the effort to raise money to pay for the surgeries which will include fitting Barnes for a prosthesis for his eye through the gofundme.com website.

Of her classmate with whom she graduated Westhill in 1997, Brady said, “He was very sweet, had good grades and very talented. He signed with a record company, has videos on You Tube and he was working on his next album.”

As of Monday morning, Dru’s Healing Fund on gofundme.com raised about $22,000 of the $25,000 goal.