Seth Walsh is the 13-year-old boy who attempted suicide last week after enduring years of bullying at the hands of his classmates and peers in Tehachapi, California. Seth was being home schooled because the abuse at his middle school was so severe. But the bullies didn’t relent: they harassed Seth at his home, on the street, in parks. Seth’s sister posted this video to YouTube while Seth was on life support:
Seth Walsh was removed from life support and died on Tuesday. And now we’re supposed to feel sorry for the bullies:
Seth Walsh, the Tehachapi 13-year-old who hanged himself from a tree in his back yard after years of being bullied, died Tuesday afternoon after nine days on life support. Tehachapi police investigators interviewed some of the young people who taunted Seth the day he hanged himself and determined despite the tragic outcome of their ridicule, their actions do not constitute a crime. “Several of the kids that we talked to broke down into tears,” Jeff Kermode, Tehachapi Police Chief, said. “They had never expected an outcome such as this.”
No one is going to be charged with a crime—not even the criminally negligent administrators at Seth’s school who failed to protect him:
Friends said Seth was picked on for years because he was gay. School administrators said they have an anti-bullying program in place, but schoolmates said staff at Jacobsen Middle School in Tehachapi offered Seth no protection or guidance.
Hello, Lambda Legal? NCLR? It’s time to start suing these school districts, and the school administrators, and the families of the bullies. Wrongful death, negligence, malicious harassment. Find something that will stick. Clearly schools in small towns and rural areas aren’t going to do anything to protect gay kids from bullying until they start to pay a price.
i don’t understand suing the families of the bullies. were the bullies parents in on the harassment?
Though I have no clue what involvement the parents of bullies had in this particular case, I do know that often times parents are quite aware their child is a bully, and do little to stop the behavior, in many cases egging it on. Another thought to your question is that maybe the parents would simply get sued because you can’t really sue a child can you? I mean, he didn’t say ‘charge the parents with a crime’… just sue.
Bullies quite often (if not entirely) are children who have abusive parents, and are taking their pain out on their schoolmates because they don’t know how to deal with it, or they don’t know it’s wrong. It makes sense that the parents should take responsibility.