A ten-year-old boy died by suicide on May 5 in Indiana, US, following persistent bullying at his school, his parents said.
“I held him in my arms,” the father of Sammy Teusch, a fourth-grader at Greenfield Intermediate School, Indiana, told WTHR. “Any time I close my eyes, it's all I can see.”
Sammy's mother believes he took his own life because he was constantly bullied, particularly after an unknown incident in a bathroom last week, which left him too scared to go to school days before he died.
His father shared that the bullying “went on for a long time.” It started with kids making fun of Sammy for wearing glasses, and then they made fun of his teeth, he said.
The bullying escalated to physical violence where they would “beat him up on the school bus, and the kids broke his glasses and everything,” the father added.
"He was my little boy. He was my baby. He was the youngest one," the mother told WTHR.
Sammy's family mentioned that the bullying didn't stop at school or on the bus – it even continued online on Snapchat, despite the boy having limited access to his phone. He recalled that the kids would threaten him with texts like, "‘I'm going to beat you up. I'm going to beat you up when you get to school',” and would say “mean things” about his mother which would “really, really set him off”.
The 10-year-old's family claims that they had alerted school authorities about the bullying situation on at least 20 occasions over the past year, yet the harassment did not stop. "I called the school," Sammy Teusch's father recalled, "And I'm like, 'What are you doing about this? It keeps getting worse, and worse, and worse'."
The school district superintendent stated that there were no reports of bullying submitted by either the parents or the boy. But the family of the boy insisted that they had made their fears about the bullying clear to the school, claiming, “they knew this was going on.”
Sammy's grandmother was angry at the district's claims of having a zero-tolerance policy on bullying, claiming that “their zero tolerance means that they don't have responsibility for it”. “People trust their kids at school, but now that trust is breaking down,” she told 21alivenews.
