After a 27-year dormancy, IT’s first casualty in the new cycle is Adrian Mellon. In Stephen King’s novel It, Adrian and his partner, Don Hagarty, leave Derry’s Canal Days festival and are attacked by three homophobic teenagers. The attackers beat Adrian, throw him from a bridge, and leave him gravely injured. Pennywise then appears beneath the bridge and kills Adrian, making him the cycle’s opening victim.
The scene establishes that IT’s evil works through both supernatural violence and ordinary human cruelty. Adrian is already badly hurt before Pennywise intervenes, so the murder is sometimes loosely described as a hate crime alone; in the novel, however, IT ultimately claims him. Don survives and reports what happened, while the town’s authorities investigate Adrian’s death without understanding its connection to the returning entity.
Readers sometimes confuse Adrian with Georgie Denbrough, the first major victim shown in the childhood storyline, or with Dorsey Corcoran, whose death belongs to an earlier Derry cycle. Henry Bowers is also a perpetrator and later becomes entangled with IT, but he is not the first casualty. The 1990 television miniseries omitted Adrian’s opening sequence, while the later film adaptation restored it.