http://www.truecrimereport.com/2010/...mits_suici.php
UPDATE:If South Hadley school officials thought they'd be able to handle this in an officious manner, they were wrong. More than 300 people showed up to a meeting last night to lambast administrators over their failure to do anything about chronic bullying. See update after the jump...
Her principal called her smart and charming. And a boy had just invited 15-year-old Irish immigrant Phoebe Prince to the winter cotillion, the height of the social season at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts. But then police received a call.
It came from one of Phoebe's sisters. When cops arrived, they found that the freshman student had hung herself. Two days before the big dance.
Though they're not releasing any details, police say she was a victim of cyber-bullying from girls at the school who had an unspecified beef with her over who she was dating.
This wasn't just any case of high school girls behaving badly toward one another. Phoebe apparently faced an onslaught of bullying via texts, Facebook messages, and in person at the school. Even after her death, the ty little girls left disparaging messages on a Facebook page created in her memory. (See the memorial page here.)
"Apparently the young woman had been subjected to taunting from her classmates, mostly through the Facebook and text messages, but also in person on at least a couple of occasions,'' school superintendent Gus Sayer told the Boston Globe.
Two students have already been suspended, and more could be on their way to discipline.
It was an especially tragic ending for the Prince family. Anne O'Brien Prince and Jeremy Prince had moved from County Clare to Massachusetts with their five kids last year. In Phoebe's death notice, they said they moved in part so "Phoebe could experience America.''
America, it seems, did not give her a very kind welcome.
UPDATE: It seems Phoebe had the misfortune of running afoul of the popular girls at South Hadley High.
You know them from your own high school: They were the pretty girls who played sports, were in cheerleading, and used their good looks to date all the name-brand jocks.
Phoebe Prince wasn't one of them. She was a freshman, had just arrived from Ireland. No way she was cool enough. She also had the misfortune of briefly dating a senior football player. The popular girls thought she didn't know her place.
So they stalked her and called her a -- to her face, over the phone, on Facebook.
She was walking home the day she died when one of the vile little girls drove past. She chucked an energy drink at Phoebe and threw more insults the Irish girl's way. Phoebe promptly walked into her house and hanged herself in a closet.
Even after her death, the popular girls wouldn't let up. They were like some vicious little caricatures of evil from a Lifetime movie.
According to a great column by Kevin Cullen in the Boston Globe, a student at South Hadley told a TV reporter that bullying was a common problem at South Hadley High. After the TV crew left, one of the popular girls came up and punched the student in the head for talking on camera.
UPDATE II: South Hadley officials faced a blistering attack last night for their failure to do anything about chronic bullying.
Parents recounted numerous incidents of kids being hounded and harassed, sometimes over multiple-year periods. One man told of how his son was punched in the stomach for befriending another bullied kid. A mom spoke of how her son was punched and had his face written on with magic marker.
Other parents talked about how they were beat up in school in the '90s. And most seemed to think administrators turned a blind eye to it all. Father Larry Bay said his daughter was bullied last year, but the school did nothing to stop it.
----
As someone who was bullied and ridiculed throughout my school years, this sickens and upsets me. Repeated bullying should end in jail time for the bullies and ANY administration or staff who saw it happen and said nothing. I don't care if they have to throw every teacher at the school in jail -- if you watch someone being verbally or physically abused and you sit idly by doing nothing, you are culpable.
wow, I didn't know girls could this vicious :0
I know guys sometimes will pick on other dudes, but damn I guess girls are just as bad.
Man, girls are even worse
This is sad.
Teens should be culpable for assault/battery/intimidation/extortion criminal charges. This is why they take justice into their own hands and end up torching homes, shooting schools, or committing suicide. Parents need to get involved too. I would of done some bullying myself to those girls' parents if I found out what their kid was doing unchecked.
It is a systematic problem that requires everyone to step up (parents, teachers, peers, administrators, cops, whoever).
Yes, teenage girls are the worst. They can qucikly turn Facebook into nothing other than a cyber slam book for all the world to read.
so she was a pretty, smart, kind young woman who killed herself over this garbage?
what a ing waste. very upsetting....why did she allow them to get to her so deeply..... that is horrible.
I was bullied some in school...until the bullys figured out that my brother, who is 18 months older then me, was a war machine. That pretty much stopped it.
This is totally on the parents. So many parents either encourage or completely turn a blind eye to these types of behaviors. You would think that after all the school shootings we have had they would have learned something.
I was bullied in 6th grade because I was short and stumpy. I got hit with combination locks, kicked, jumped by more than 3 or 4 kids, and always subjected to verbal abuse. THEN in the summer between 6th and 7th I hit a growth spurt. I wasn't short and chubby and I got a lot more attention from the ladies. I started learning how to box and by the end of 8th grade I not only kicked the ass of every POS kid that had picked on me but was one of the more intimidating presences at my school. I did not bully anyone though but I did stick up for kids that would get bullied because of what I went through.
Then I went to highschool back on my side of town and never had to deal with that again.
http://www.usingenglish.com/referenc...erbs/hang.html
Both are acceptable for third person simple (verb by itself) and past particple (using the "helper" verb "had")forms, although strictly speaking it should be hung, as it is an old germanic irregular verb.
Irregular verbs are, linguistically speaking, on the way out though. A good thing in my opinion.
In Texas it's hanged.
Shut up
9-year-old Colony boy dies in apparent suicide at school
by CYNTHIA VEGA / WFAA-TV
Posted on January 22, 2010 at 1:14 PM
Updated Friday, Jan 22 at 1:21 PM
******
THE COLONY — Grief counselors were on hand at a Lewisville ISD school on Friday after a fourth grade student apparently killed himself on campus yesterday.
It has been a painful day for most at Stewart's Creek Elementary School, as they have processed what has happened.
They got a real-life lesson they had no choice but to get. That is that suicide is one of the leading causes of death for school-age children, and most vulnerable of all are boys, ages 10 to 14.
It is hard to believe that elementary school students could even contemplate suicide, let alone commit it.
But the reality of a nine-year-old boy hanging himself in the nurse's bathroom cannot be ignored.
"It's just sad. I can't imagine what would make a nine-year-old boy feel this way," said Stephanie Rodriguez, the school's PTA treasurer.
She said she told her son Lewis, 9, that if he ever feels bad that he must either talk to her or his father.
School officials said the boy was in the office all day on Thursday, asked to use the bathroom, and was checked on twice. The third time he was checked, he was found unconscious.
"We do know that this incident is not related to any form of bullying," said Lewisville spokeswoman, Karen Pemetti.
This is a blatant lie by the school representatives. The local news did several interviews with different classmates of his, all of whom stated outright that "almost everyone in the school picks on him." I don't know if school officials really are so superbly oblivious to bullying or just indifferent to it."We do know that this incident is not related to any form of bullying," said Lewisville spokeswoman, Karen Pemetti.
+1
I understand the outrage of the parents towards the school system but this story sounds like the worst was done to this poor girl outside of the school. I've got a brother and a sister who teach high school who have told me about bullying victims who go to great lengths to cover this stuff up because they know that if the teachers get involved it will only make things worse for them when they leave campus.
That's one of the issues. The school really has no say in what these kids do on their own computers in their own homes and on their own cell phones on their own time away from school. They can obviously contact parents and law enforcement, but they really can't do anything at school to punish these kids for what they do outside of school. An administrator or counselor can't really do anything to make a parent control the kid at home.
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