Ashlynn Conner's mother said she had come home from school crying
BY NINA MANDELL
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, November 14 2011, 4:01 PM
/CBS
Ashlynn Conner committed suicide after allegedly being bullied at school and in her neighborhood.
A 10-year-old Illinois girl who hanged herself in her closet last week had suffered repeated taunts from bullies mocking her for being overweight, her family said.
Ashlynn Conner’s heartbroken mother, Stacy, told local TV station WCIA-TV that Ashlynn had come home crying from school about two weeks ago, complaining that she was being bullied in her neighborhood as well as at school.
Then, last Thursday, the taunts got so bad that Ashlynn asked her mother to be home-schooled.
Her mother said no to the request. The next day, Ashlynn’s sister found her hanging in the closet from a scarf fashioned into a noose, the TV station reported.
“I thought my kids are strong kids, and that my words for them for guidance and advice [were\] going to have more weight than what these kids could be saying,” Stacy Conner told WCIA-TV on Sunday.
The young girl’s ordeal became a tragedy despite the existence of an anti-bullying law in Illinois. The state first passed an anti-bullying law in 2001 and has continuously strengthened it over the past decade.
But the law was not able to protect Ashlynn from the pain that led her to take her life.
“I don't know what it's going to take to stop it, but no child should ever have to feel like they have to kill themselves to stop that kind of pain,” her mother said.
nmandell@nydailynews.com
Monday, November 14, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Photographer Refuses to Take Portraits of Facebook Bullies
By CLARA KIM | Time.com – Mon, Aug 22, 2011
A Pennsylvania photographer canceled senior photo sessions with four high school girls after spotting nasty comments they made on Facebook.
Jennifer McKendrick says she came across a 'burn book' Facebook page, created by teens for writing negative comments about their classmates. You might think it's a phase every gossipy high schooler goes through, but this one went a little too far, at least for McKendrick. Appalled by the cruel comments, the photographer also realized that the names on the screen matched the names of the clients who made an appointment with her for their senior photos.
(MORE: How to Bully-Proof Young Girls)
McKendrick decided to cancel the sessions and posted on her blog that she doesn't want to photograph "ugly people."
"Realistically I know by canceling their shoots it's not going to make them 'nicer people,'" she wrote. "But I refuse to let people like that represent my business."
Then, she emailed the four girls and their parents. She sent them explanations of why she was canceling the appointment along with screen shots of the mean Facebook comments as a proof. Later, she reported on her blog that two parents replied with apologies and saying that they were shocked by their daughters' actions.
(VIDEO: Chris Colfer Talks, Glee, Bullying and Being Yourself)
In an interview with WTAE-TV, McKendrick said that the students' comments crossed the line.
"It was beyond 'your clothes are ugly' or 'you don't have any brand clothes' or 'you are ugly, your hair is not right,'" she told WTAE-TV. "It was vicious. It was talking about sexuality."
So far, McKendrick's received floods of support on Facebook and her blog, but she said she is ready for criticisms.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
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
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Liverpool,PA: Bullying cited by Pa. teen who killed himself
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 9, 2010; 3:18 PMLIVERPOOL, 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."
"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 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."
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Mentor, Ohio: 1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead by own hand
1 Ohio school, 4 bullied teens dead by own hand
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.
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
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.
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."
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