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Huron Township, MI: Mourners remember taunted Huron Township teen who killed self

Micki Steele / The Detroit News

Mourners gathered fora visitation Saturday afternoon for the 14-year-old Huron Township girl who hanged herself Monday after withstanding taunts from schoolmates about a non-consensual sex act with an 18-year-old senior.

Samantha Kelly's cream casket was topped with a large spray of pink flowers and surrounded by floral arrangements as family and friends consoled one another and talked in a chapel of the Michigan Memorial Funeral Homein Flat Rock.

Photos of the girl along with stuffed animals and mementos were displayed on the back wall.

"It's not even imaginable to think that she felt she wasn't worth being here," said Shaunna Reynolds, 30, a former neighbor of Samantha's mother, June Justice, when she lived in Flat Rock's Walnut Creek Apartments.

ReynoldssaidJustice seemed numb during the visitation.

"She's here, but her mind is not really here," she said.

Justicetold police on Sep. 27 that her daughter, a Huron High School freshman, had sex with Joseph Tarnopolski the night before in his parents' mobile home, eight doors down. Both youths told police and school officials the act was consensual.

But Tarnopolski was charged Oct. 12 with one count of third-degree criminal sexual conduct, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, because children under 16 cannot consent to sex under Michigan law. He was released on bond and allowed to return school, where administrators agreed to keep Samantha and Tarnopolski apart.

When the girl and her mother later appeared on WJBK-TV (Channel 2) to express concerns about slow justice and efforts to transfer Samantha to another school, students and neighbors openly took sides.

Samantha tried to commit suicide with prescription drugs in late October, her family said, and she missed a week of school, returning Monday.

The felony charge against Tarnopolski was dismissed Wednesday due to insufficient evidence — the victim's testimony.

Samantha's funeral will be held at 1 p.m. Sunday at Michigan Memorial Funeral Home in Flat Rock. 313-222-2620

Liverpool,PA: Bullying cited by Pa. teen who killed himself

The Associated Press 

Tuesday, November 9, 2010; 3:18 PM

LIVERPOOL, Pa. -- A high-school freshman who committed suicide by running into the path of a tractor-trailer last week left behind a note that said he wanted to draw attention to the problem of bullying, his mother said Tuesday.

Fourteen-year-old Brandon Bitner complained about teasing and name-calling when he was in middle school, but after he entered Midd-West High School in Middleburg this year, he began concealing his pain from school officials and his family.
"He didn't want to burden other people with his problems," his mother, Tammy Simpson, said in a telephone interview as the family prepared for Wednesday's funeral in this rural central Pennsylvania community. "I'm sure he felt that, if somebody said something, (the teasing) would get even worse."
State police said Bitner walked several miles from his family's home in Mount Pleasant Mills before killing himself early Friday near Liverpool.

Simpson described her only son as a soft-spoken youth who aspired to be a classical violinist and had many female friends. His note said he was tired of being called names like "faggot" and "sissy," according to The Patriot-News in Harrisburg.
Simpson said her son "never told us" what his sexual orientation was but that she didn't care.
"He was the most wonderful child anyone could ask for," she said.
In his note, Bitner cited an encounter with another student in the school cafeteria several days before his death as "the straw that broke the camel's back," Simpson said.
The incident in question occurred Nov. 1, four days before his death, during a program that high-school principal Cynthia Hutchinson said is designed to promote positive behavior among students. Among other things, several students take turns wearing the costume of the school's mascot - a mustang - and roam around the cafeteria high-fiving, hugging and dancing with students during lunch periods, she said.
The young man wearing the costume "hugged a fair number of students throughout the cafeteria that day and Brandon was one of them, but that was all that happened. It was absolutely innocent," the principal said in a telephone interview.
Simpson, however, said her son thought he was being ridiculed.
The student in the mustang costume has a reputation of being "kindhearted and would never do anything to hurt or offend anyone else," Hutchinson said. "I can only guess that (Bitner) misunderstood and misinterpreted."
Wesley Knapp, the Midd-West School District superintendent, said the suicide prompted him to re-evaluate the safeguards that the school district has set up to prevent bullying.
"When you lose one of your students, it's painful," he said. "We all ask ourselves what could we have done perhaps to have prevented it."

Mentor, Ohio: 1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead by own hand

1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead by own hand

By MEGHAN BARR, Associated Press WriterFri Oct 8, 4:01 pm ET

MENTOR, Ohio – Sladjana Vidovic's body lay in an open casket, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom. Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out her bedroom window.

The 16-year-old's last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults like "Slutty Jana" and threw food at her.

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

Now two families -- including the Vidovics -- are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it. The lawsuits come after a national spate of high-profile suicides by gay teens and others, and during a time of national soul-searching about what can be done to stop it.

[Related: School-yard bullying: A survivor's tale]

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket -- and laughed.

"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died."

___

Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming. She loved to dance. She would turn on the stereo and drag her father out of his chair, dance him in circles around the living room.

"Nonstop smile. Nonstop music," says her father, Dragan, who speaks only a little English.

At school, life was very different. She was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like "Slutty Jana" or "Slut-Jana-Vagina." A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.

Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she'd be dead in the morning, that they'd find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.

"Sladjana did stand up for herself, but toward the end she just kind of stopped," says her best friend, Jelena Jandric. "Because she couldn't handle it. She didn't have enough strength."

[Related: Cyber-bullying: When enough is enough]

Vidovic's parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her.

She had already withdrawn from Mentor and enrolled in an online school about a week before she killed herself.

When the family tried to retrieve records about their reports of bullying, school officials told them the records were destroyed during a switch to computers. The family sued in August.

Two years after her death, Dragan Vidovic waves his hand over the family living room, where a vase of pink flowers stands next to a photograph of Sladjana.

"Today, no music," he says sadly. "No smile."

___

Eric Mohat was flamboyant and loud and preferred to wear pink most of the time. When he didn't get the lead soprano part in the choir his freshman year, he was indignant, his mother says.

He wore a stuffed animal strapped to his arm, a lemur named Georges that was given its own seat in class.

"It was a gag," says Mohat's father, Bill. "And all the girls would come up to pet his monkey. And in his Spanish class they would write stories about Georges."

Mohat's family and friends say he wasn't gay, but people thought he was.

"They called him fag, homo, queer," says his mother, Jan. "He told us that."

Bullies once knocked a pile of books out of his hands on the stairs, saying, "'Pick up your books, faggot,'" says Dan Hughes, a friend of Eric's.

Kids would flick him in the head or call him names, says 20-year-old Drew Juratovac, a former student. One time, a boy called Mohat a "homo," and Juratovac told him to leave Mohat alone.

"I got up and said, 'Listen, you better leave this kid alone. Just walk away,'" he says. "And I just hit him in the face. And I got suspended for it."

Eric Mohat shot himself on March 29, 2007, two weeks before a choir trip to Hawaii.

His parents asked the coroner to call it "bullicide." At Eric's funeral and after his death, other kids told the Mohats that they had seen the teen relentlessly bullied in math class. The Mohats demanded that police investigate, but no criminal activity was found.

[Related: 6 signs of cyber-bullying and what you can do about it]

Two years later, in April 2009, the Mohats sued the school district, the principal, the superintendent and Eric's math teacher. The federal lawsuit is on hold while the Ohio Supreme Court considers a question of state law regarding the case.

"Did we raise him to be too polite?" Bill Mohat wonders. "Did we leave him defenseless in this school?"

___

Meredith Rezak, 16, shot herself in the head three weeks after the death of Mohat, a good friend of hers. Her cell phone, found next to her body, contained a photograph of Mohat with the caption "R.I.P. Eric a.k.a. Twiggy."

Rezak was bright, outgoing and a well-liked player on the volleyball team. Shortly before her suicide, she had joined the school's Gay-Straight Alliance and told friends and family she thought she might be gay.

Juratovac says Rezak endured her own share of bullying — "name-calling, just stupid trivial stuff" — but nobody ever knew it was getting to her.

"Meredith ended up coming out that she was a lesbian," he says. "I think much of that sparked a lot of the bullying from a lot of the other girls in school, 'cause she didn't fit in."

Her best friend, Kevin Simon, doesn't believe that bullying played a role in Rezak's death. She had serious issues at home that were unrelated to school, he says.

After Mohat's death, people saw Rezak crying at school, and friends heard her talk of suicide herself.

A year after Rezak's death, the older of her two brothers, 22-year-old Justin, also shot and killed himself. His death certificate mentioned "chronic depressive reaction."

This March, her only other sibling, Matthew, died of a drug overdose at age 21.

Their mother, Nancy Merritt, lives in Colorado now. She doesn't think Meredith was bullied to death but doesn't really know what happened. On the phone, her voice drifts off, sounding disconnected, confused.

"So all three of mine are gone," she says. "I have to keep breathing."

___

Most mornings before school, Jennifer Eyring would take Pepto-Bismol to calm her stomach and plead with her mother to let her stay home.

"She used to sob to me in the morning that she did not want to go," says her mother, Janet. "And this is going to bring tears to my eyes. Because I made her go to school."

Eyring, 16, was an accomplished equestrian who had a learning disability. She was developmentally delayed and had a hearing problem, so she received tutoring during the school day. For that, her mother says, she was bullied constantly.

By the end of her sophomore year in 2006, Eyring's mother had decided to pull her out of Mentor High School and enroll her in an online school the following autumn. But one night that summer, Jennifer walked into her parents' bedroom and told them she had taken some of her mother's antidepressant pills to make herself feel better. Hours later, she died of an overdose.

[Related: Stop bullying by complaining – in writing]

The Eyrings do not hold Mentor High accountable, but they believe she would be alive today had she not been bullied. Her parents are speaking out in hopes of preventing more tragedies.

"It's too late for my daughter," Janet Eyring says, "but it may not be too late for someone else."

___

No official from Mentor public schools would comment for this story. The school also refused to provide details on its anti-bullying program.

Some students say the problem is the culture of conformity in this city of about 50,000 people: If you're not an athlete or cheerleader, you're not cool. And if you're not cool, you're a prime target for the bullies.

But that's not so different from most high schools. Senior Matt Super, who's 17, says the suicides unfairly paint his school in a bad light.

"Not everybody's a good person," he says. "And in a group of 3,000 people, there are going to be bad people."

StopCyberbulling.org founder Parry Aftab says this is the first time she's heard of two sets of parents suing a school at the same time for two independent cases of bullying or cyberbullying. No one has been accused of bullying more than one of the teens who died.

Barbara Coloroso, a national anti-bullying expert, says the school is allowing a "culture of mean" to thrive, and school officials should be held responsible for the suicides — along with the bullies.

"Bullying doesn't start as criminal. They need to be held accountable the very first time they call somebody a gross term," Coloroso says. "That is the beginning of dehumanization."

Mentor, Ohio: 1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead by own hand

1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead by own hand

By MEGHAN BARR, Associated Press WriterFri Oct 8, 4:01 pm ET

MENTOR, Ohio – Sladjana Vidovic's body lay in an open casket, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom. Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out her bedroom window.

The 16-year-old's last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults like "Slutty Jana" and threw food at her.

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

Now two families -- including the Vidovics -- are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it. The lawsuits come after a national spate of high-profile suicides by gay teens and others, and during a time of national soul-searching about what can be done to stop it.

[Related: School-yard bullying: A survivor's tale]

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket -- and laughed.

"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died."

___

Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming. She loved to dance. She would turn on the stereo and drag her father out of his chair, dance him in circles around the living room.

"Nonstop smile. Nonstop music," says her father, Dragan, who speaks only a little English.

At school, life was very different. She was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like "Slutty Jana" or "Slut-Jana-Vagina." A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.

Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she'd be dead in the morning, that they'd find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.

"Sladjana did stand up for herself, but toward the end she just kind of stopped," says her best friend, Jelena Jandric. "Because she couldn't handle it. She didn't have enough strength."

[Related: Cyber-bullying: When enough is enough]

Vidovic's parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her.

She had already withdrawn from Mentor and enrolled in an online school about a week before she killed herself.

When the family tried to retrieve records about their reports of bullying, school officials told them the records were destroyed during a switch to computers. The family sued in August.

Two years after her death, Dragan Vidovic waves his hand over the family living room, where a vase of pink flowers stands next to a photograph of Sladjana.

"Today, no music," he says sadly. "No smile."

___

Eric Mohat was flamboyant and loud and preferred to wear pink most of the time. When he didn't get the lead soprano part in the choir his freshman year, he was indignant, his mother says.

He wore a stuffed animal strapped to his arm, a lemur named Georges that was given its own seat in class.

"It was a gag," says Mohat's father, Bill. "And all the girls would come up to pet his monkey. And in his Spanish class they would write stories about Georges."

Mohat's family and friends say he wasn't gay, but people thought he was.

"They called him fag, homo, queer," says his mother, Jan. "He told us that."

Bullies once knocked a pile of books out of his hands on the stairs, saying, "'Pick up your books, faggot,'" says Dan Hughes, a friend of Eric's.

Kids would flick him in the head or call him names, says 20-year-old Drew Juratovac, a former student. One time, a boy called Mohat a "homo," and Juratovac told him to leave Mohat alone.

"I got up and said, 'Listen, you better leave this kid alone. Just walk away,'" he says. "And I just hit him in the face. And I got suspended for it."

Eric Mohat shot himself on March 29, 2007, two weeks before a choir trip to Hawaii.

His parents asked the coroner to call it "bullicide." At Eric's funeral and after his death, other kids told the Mohats that they had seen the teen relentlessly bullied in math class. The Mohats demanded that police investigate, but no criminal activity was found.

[Related: 6 signs of cyber-bullying and what you can do about it]

Two years later, in April 2009, the Mohats sued the school district, the principal, the superintendent and Eric's math teacher. The federal lawsuit is on hold while the Ohio Supreme Court considers a question of state law regarding the case.

"Did we raise him to be too polite?" Bill Mohat wonders. "Did we leave him defenseless in this school?"

___

Meredith Rezak, 16, shot herself in the head three weeks after the death of Mohat, a good friend of hers. Her cell phone, found next to her body, contained a photograph of Mohat with the caption "R.I.P. Eric a.k.a. Twiggy."

Rezak was bright, outgoing and a well-liked player on the volleyball team. Shortly before her suicide, she had joined the school's Gay-Straight Alliance and told friends and family she thought she might be gay.

Juratovac says Rezak endured her own share of bullying — "name-calling, just stupid trivial stuff" — but nobody ever knew it was getting to her.

"Meredith ended up coming out that she was a lesbian," he says. "I think much of that sparked a lot of the bullying from a lot of the other girls in school, 'cause she didn't fit in."

Her best friend, Kevin Simon, doesn't believe that bullying played a role in Rezak's death. She had serious issues at home that were unrelated to school, he says.

After Mohat's death, people saw Rezak crying at school, and friends heard her talk of suicide herself.

A year after Rezak's death, the older of her two brothers, 22-year-old Justin, also shot and killed himself. His death certificate mentioned "chronic depressive reaction."

This March, her only other sibling, Matthew, died of a drug overdose at age 21.

Their mother, Nancy Merritt, lives in Colorado now. She doesn't think Meredith was bullied to death but doesn't really know what happened. On the phone, her voice drifts off, sounding disconnected, confused.

"So all three of mine are gone," she says. "I have to keep breathing."

___

Most mornings before school, Jennifer Eyring would take Pepto-Bismol to calm her stomach and plead with her mother to let her stay home.

"She used to sob to me in the morning that she did not want to go," says her mother, Janet. "And this is going to bring tears to my eyes. Because I made her go to school."

Eyring, 16, was an accomplished equestrian who had a learning disability. She was developmentally delayed and had a hearing problem, so she received tutoring during the school day. For that, her mother says, she was bullied constantly.

By the end of her sophomore year in 2006, Eyring's mother had decided to pull her out of Mentor High School and enroll her in an online school the following autumn. But one night that summer, Jennifer walked into her parents' bedroom and told them she had taken some of her mother's antidepressant pills to make herself feel better. Hours later, she died of an overdose.

[Related: Stop bullying by complaining – in writing]

The Eyrings do not hold Mentor High accountable, but they believe she would be alive today had she not been bullied. Her parents are speaking out in hopes of preventing more tragedies.

"It's too late for my daughter," Janet Eyring says, "but it may not be too late for someone else."

___

No official from Mentor public schools would comment for this story. The school also refused to provide details on its anti-bullying program.

Some students say the problem is the culture of conformity in this city of about 50,000 people: If you're not an athlete or cheerleader, you're not cool. And if you're not cool, you're a prime target for the bullies.

But that's not so different from most high schools. Senior Matt Super, who's 17, says the suicides unfairly paint his school in a bad light.

"Not everybody's a good person," he says. "And in a group of 3,000 people, there are going to be bad people."

StopCyberbulling.org founder Parry Aftab says this is the first time she's heard of two sets of parents suing a school at the same time for two independent cases of bullying or cyberbullying. No one has been accused of bullying more than one of the teens who died.

Barbara Coloroso, a national anti-bullying expert, says the school is allowing a "culture of mean" to thrive, and school officials should be held responsible for the suicides — along with the bullies.

"Bullying doesn't start as criminal. They need to be held accountable the very first time they call somebody a gross term," Coloroso says. "That is the beginning of dehumanization."

Deerfield Beach, FL: Burn Victim Michael Brewer Speaks Out Against Bullying Boy Who Was Burned Calls Recovery 'Agony'

Cleveland, OH: Ohio school sued over suicide in bullying case

The Associated Press
Friday, August 20, 2010; 4:41 PM 

CLEVELAND -- The family of a 16-year-old girl who committed suicide is suing her Ohio school, accusing officials of failing to stop relentless bullying by classmates prior to her death.
The lawsuit says Sladjana Vidovic (sla-JANA' VID'-uh-vic) was verbally harassed and on one occasion pushed down a set of stairs at Mentor High School, about 20 miles northeast of Cleveland.
The family's attorney, Kenneth Myers, says Vidovic, whose parents are from Croatia, was teased about her heritage and accent. He said Vidovic became depressed over the bullying and hanged herself from her bedroom window on Oct. 2, 2008.
The lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court seeks unspecified damages.
School superintendent Jacqueline Hoynes says the district will vigorously defend itself against the allegations.

Shreveport, LA: Mother: Teen was bullied for years

August 11, 2010

Police searching for Samuel 'Bubba' Anderson's killer
By Loresha Wilson
ljwilson@gannett.com

Gladys Walker saw police cars race up the street with flashing lights and sirens. Moments later, the phone rang and her husband asked "where is Bubba."

Walker's motherly instinct instantly told her something was wrong.

"I felt it," she said. "I didn't know what it was, but I just knew it. Eventually, I left home to see for myself, and I prayed all the way up Audrey Lane that nothing was wrong with my child."

About a mile away from Walker's north Shreveport residence, at the corner of Audrey Lane at Thomas E. Howard Drive, her son, Samuel "Bubba" Anderson, was lying in a vacant field, dead from multiple gunshot wounds. Police say a passer-by found the 16-year-old about 6:30 p.m. Aug. 1. He'd been there at least an hour.

For at least five years, the teen has been the subject of bullying, beatings and threats. Walker says she's made call after call to police seeking help for her child. In March, three carloads of teens pulled in front of the house looking for Anderson and nothing was done, the mother said.

"Samuel use to come home running every day saying 'Mama, they jumped me.' or "Mama, come pick me up. They trying to jump me,'" Walker said. "It had gotten so bad that I started telling him to try and stay close to home.

"I begged police for help. If they would have done it at first, my child wouldn't be dead."

Shreveport Police Chief Willie Shaw defends his department, saying policies and procedures are in place to delineate how officers respond to reported crimes. And he contends the officers act according to departmental guidelines.

"As I have said before, crimes like this are difficult to predict with any degree of accuracy; in other words, murders are not normally crimes that we can pattern by looking at emerging trends," Shaw said. "It is almost impossible to know when someone is going to pick up a gun or a knife and resolve a conflict, whether real or perceived, in a violent, criminal manner.

"However, we will continue our fight against violent crimes on several fronts, and our investigators will continue working tirelessly to determine who is responsible for the death of Samuel Anderson.

Shreveport police have responded to several calls for service at Walker's residence in the 2700 of Martin Luther King Drive. Authorities didn't release specifics on the calls but say they include reports of fights, shootings, harassing phone calls, juvenile complaints and warrant executions.

One report indicates that a juvenile, 16, punched his little brother in the mouth and in another report, one person who lives at the house, was arrested for illegal use of a weapon.

"Now those are the calls at her home," said Bill Goodin, spokesman for Shreveport police. "That does not mean she called and some of those are going to be self initiated calls where an officer got down at that location on a follow-up or a warrant execution."

Meanwhile, the investigation into Anderson's death continues. Detectives have interviewed numerous people and are still trying to identify the suspect or suspects involved.

Walker talked with investigators Monday and is confident they're doing what they can to find the person responsible for killing her child. She blames herself for not doing her part to protect him, but says this time she won't give up.

"Grant me, I'm not stopping," she said. "I'm not giving up until they catch the person who killed my baby."

School offered bully tracking

Friday, August 13, 2010

By FRED CONTRADA

fcontrada@repub.com

SOUTH HADLEY - A South Hadley High School alumnus is donating to his former school system a software program he designed to track bullying complaints.

Edward G. Wall, who graduated from the high school in 1988, said he formed Earshot Technologies and created the tracking software in response to the death of freshman Phoebe Prince and the subsequent turmoil over the school's handing of the situation.

Prince, 15, hanged herself in Jan. 14 following what investigators have said was several months of bullying and harassment by some classmates. Six former South Hadley High School students face criminal charges in connection with Prince.

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As Wall explained it, the software allows students, parents or anyone else to report bullying by accessing an on-line form. The schools can provide links to the system through the School Department website, the Internet social networking site, Facebook.com, or a number of other ways, Wall said.

Every teacher, guidance counselor and administrator who interacts with the student named on the form will immediately be texted and can add their own observations. The software will, thus, compile a comprehensive report that cites multiple sources.

"One of the big complaints (in the Prince situation) was the delay in time and who was notified and when," Wall said.

His application keeps track of those details so that school officials can say exactly when they learned of a certain situation and how they responded.

Critics of the school system contend that teachers and administrators failed to deal adequately with the situation in advance of Prince's suicide.

Following the deaths of Prince and Carl Walk-Hoover, an 11-year-old student at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield who hanged himself in 2009 after being bullied, the state Legislature passed a law mandating that every school system in Massachusetts come up with a plan for dealing with bullying.

South Hadley created an anti-bullying task force that met for several months. Among its areas of concern was creating a reporting system for bullying acts, preferably one that would allow people to remain anonymous. Along those lines, Wall came up with his Anti-Bullying Anonymous Incident Reporting and Management Application.

The cost of the software is $2,200, but Wall is donating it to South Hadley. He is also marketing the application to other school systems. Wall, who has been making his living as accountant and financial adviser, said he experienced bullying in school himself.

"I was able to handle it and move on," he said.

He hopes to create a fund with profits from his software to provide counseling for both victims and bullies whose families lack health insurance.

Charlottesville, VA: Did Depression or an Alleged Bully Boss Prompt Editor's Suicide?

Editor Made 18 Calls to University Before Committing Suicide

By RAY SANCHEZ

Aug. 19, 2010—

In the days before Kevin Morrissey committed suicide near the University of Virginia campus, at least two co-workers said they warned university officials about his growing despair over alleged workplace bullying at the award-winning Virginia Quarterly Review.
"I told them, 'I'm very concerned about Kevin; I'm afraid he might try to harm himself,'" said a colleague and friend of Morrissey, who asked not to be identified. "They asked me to clarify what I meant and I repeated that I was afraid he might harm himself. If someone had just done something."
On July 30, Morrissey, the review's 52-year-old managing editor, walked to the old coal tower near campus and shot himself in the head. Morrissey's death underscored the turmoil at the high-profile journal, according to co-workers.
Maria Morrissey said her brother's phone records showed that he placed at least 18 calls to university officials in the final two weeks of his life. The phone records, obtained by ABCNews.com, showed calls to the human resources department, the ombudsman, the faculty and employee assistance center, and the university president.
"Kevin was asking for help," said Maria Morrissey, who had been estranged from her brother in recent years, but has started looking into the circumstances of his death.
Morrissey's sister and co-workers acknowledged that he long suffered from depression. But they insisted that he took his life only after the university failed to respond to repeated complaints about alleged bullying by his boss, Ted Genoways. Other employees, they said, also complained about being bullied by the journal's top editor.
"Bullying seems to make it like some sort of schoolyard thing," said the colleague who asked not to be named. "It's really a much more subtle kind of erasure. 'I'm not going to talk to you. I'm going to come in the side office and shut the door. I will pretend you don't exist.' The university has these [human resources] people, but they don't do anything. After one of your colleagues has killed himself, it's beyond the point of mediation. They didn't protect us. We went again and again and again and they didn't protect us."
Genoways, who is highly regarded in literary circles, has denied the allegations of bullying. He said Morrissey's own depression prompted the suicide. "His long history of depression caused him trouble throughout his career, leading often to conflicts with his bosses," he said in a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
In the statement, Genoways claimed that the university already "reviewed all the allegations being made against me and found them to be without grounds." A university spokeswoman said the investigation, including a financial audit of the magazine, was continuing.

A Suicide and Accusations of Workplace Bullying

On Aug. 1, two days after Morrissey's death, Genoways sent an e-mail informing friends and colleagues of the suicide and defending himself against the accusations of bullying.
Genoways said he had known Morrissey since 2000 and they had been close friends. When Genoways' son was born in 2002, the first flowers to arrive at the hospital were from Morrissey. He hired his friend as managing editor in 2004, Genoways wrote.
"But I never had any illusions about who Kevin was," he continued in the e-mail, which ABC News has obtained. "He was prickly, mercurial, often brooding."
Genoways said the two men basked in the small review's recent literary success, but that Morrissey had become withdrawn and "his mood darkened" in recent months, leading to strained relations with his boss.
Genoways wrote that Morrissey "felt less important to me professionally as our staff grew. I know that he came to feel trapped, paradoxically, by a job he considered too good to quit. As Kevin struggled through these issues, particularly in the last year, his work suffered and his demeanor, to my mind, was often unacceptable for the workplace. We feuded over this often, and the majority of the VQR staff sided with Kevin.
"That tension between my staff and me grew poisonous," he wrote.
"Kevin in particular had a history of disagreeing with his bosses, and now that I was the boss I should expect to be hated," Genoways wrote.
"I don't doubt that these conflicts fed Kevin's depression, but I cannot accept the final blame. ... I feel unspeakably saddened by Kevin's death, but I do not feel responsible," Genoways wrote.
Genoways' lawyer, Lloyd Snook, also defended his client, who he said was in contact with the human resources department regarding the work environment at the Virginia Quarterly Review.
"Any time there's a suicide, a lot of folks end up either looking in mirrors and saying to themselves, 'What could I have done differently?' or they end up looking for other people to blame," Snook told ABCNews.com. "There's a lot of that going around on both sides. It's obviously an intensely sad time."
Workplace bullying may be getting worse with the recession. In good times, abused workers simply walk out, said Gary Namie, a social psychologist and founder of the Washington-based Workplace Bullying Institute. But with high unemployment, many employees feel they must stay put.

The Issue of Workplace Bullying

"The story behind the story is the employer's failure to respond," Namie said. "They don't know what to do about it. We've come to realize that when the institution doesn't know what to do, by default it does nothing, and they worsen the problem."
Namie said University of Virginia officials contacted him about general bullying issues two years ago.
"They wanted a motivational speaker," he said, but the two sides were unable to agree on terms and Namie never spoke at the school. Wood could not confirm the school contacted Namie, but said a daylong university-wide workshop on workplace bullying was held in March 2009.
The university has launched an investigation into the allegations of bullying at the journal. In a statement, university spokeswoman Carolyn Wood declined to discuss "confidential personal matters" but added: "We can say unequivocally that before Mr. Morrissey's death, all Virginia Quarterly Review staff members had been working with human resources professionals to address issues within the VQR office."
"In the wake of Mr. Morrissey's death," the statement said, "the university continues to work with all members of the VQR staff to address and resolve these issues."
In Morrissey's case, co-workers said he appeared to become more despondent in recent months as his relationship with his boss and longtime close friend deteriorated with no solution in sight.
"I am convinced that the escalating events of the last two weeks of his life drove him to a point where he felt there was no relief available for him," the co-worker said.
Genoways had recently argued with Morrissey and another employee and banished the pair from the office for one week, ordering Morrissey to not communicate with any of his colleagues, according to co-workers.
At times, co-workers said, Genoways could be heard yelling at Morrissey behind closed doors. Other times, they said, the Genoways was openly dismissive of Morrissey.
Though the workplace tension at the journal had been mounting for years it seemed to escalate recently, even though Genoways was out of the office much of the time on a fellowship.
Genoways had his staff read and forward his e-mails, but about an hour before Morrissey killed himself, Genoways sent him an angry e-mail questioning his apparently tardy response to a Mexican journalist who was covering that country's drug wars who felt he was in mortal danger.
"But just so I'm clear: Why did it take you ten days to forward a message from someone asking our assistance with saving his life," Genoways demanded in his e-mail, of which ABC News has obtained a copy.
"Kevin had repeated meetings with people in human resources, the office of the university ombudsman and the president," the co-worker said. "Last spring, four staff members, including Kevin, went to the president's staff and told them that we were finding work conditions under Ted completely untenable. ...They sort of said, 'Oh, working with creative people is sometimes difficult.'"

Workplace Bullying Described as "Bullycide"

Experts acknowledge that it is nearly impossible to pinpoint what pushes a depressed person to the brink of suicide.
David Yamada, director of the New Workplace Institute at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, studies workplace bullying. He said in the case of a suicide a confluence of factors -- including limited family support, isolation and work stress -- often contribute. He said experts call it "bullycide."
"Especially when someone takes their life, we don't know what may have pushed him over the top," he said. "One of the common scenarios in workplace bullying is that the offender often is very good at taking advantage of an individual's vulnerabilities to the point where their health is impaired. Thanks goodness it doesn't usually result in someone committing suicide."
Yamada said he was not familiar with the details of Morrissey's death, but said, "I would hope that we at least evaluate this tragedy in light of what we do know about workplace bullying, which does suggest that bullying-related suicide is at least a plausible scenario."
Maria Morrissey, who obtained her brother's phone records and checked his home computer after his death, said she suspected that her brother felt increasingly isolated in those final weeks. He made 18 calls to university officials, she said. He checked his home computer for extended-stay hotels in the area, she said. She said he repeatedly marked the pages of the book, "Working with the Self-Absorbed: How to Handle Narcissistic Personalities on the Job," by Nina Brown. "He was anxious about his job," she said. "He doesn't know why he's in trouble. He's got a condo that he's got a mortgage for. He got a new car that he's got a note for. He doesn't have a college degree and there aren't a whole lot of jobs for the managing editor of some literary journal. He's looking at having to uproot his entire life if he doesn't get help. He found himself utterly trapped."
According to his sister, Morrissey typed his suicide note on his home computer which read, "I'm sorry. I know she won't understand this, but I just couldn't bear it anymore." Maria Morrissey, who is thinking about suing the university, said the note referred to a longtime friend from Minnesota.
Morrissey called the police to report the shooting before actually taking his own life.