ryan whos life ended to soon.

Ryan's mother:

October 7, 2003 will always be the day that divides my life. Before that day my son Ryan was alive. A sweet, gentle and lanky thirteen year old fumbling his way through early adolescence and trying to establish his place in the often confusing and difficult social world of middle school. After that day my son would be gone forever, a death by suicide. Some would call it bullycide or even cyber bullycide. I just call it a huge hole in my heart that will never heal.

Our son Ryan was a sweet, gentle and very sensitive soul. He was born in Poughkeepsie , NY just a week before Christmas. That Christmas, Ryan was the best present of all. As he grew, his affectionate way made it irresistible to hug him and feel him hug you back. He had the magic ability to bring a smile to anyone that looked his way. As he grew, he developed a wonderful sense of humor too. And when we moved into new neighborhoods twice during his life, kids quickly gravitated to his warmth and friendliness.

But there were early concerns with Ryan’s speech, language and motor skills development as he neared kindergarten. Ryan received special education services from pre-school through the fourth grade. We will always be grateful for the entire staff at Hiawatha Elementary School in Essex Junction for being so wonderful and caring for our son. The special education team there fell in love with him and his drive to do his best every day. By the time he reached the fifth grade, he was assessed to be on grade and no longer needing special education services. But as he became older, he also became more aware that he was not as academically strong as most of his classmates. This began to bother him deeply as he headed into middle school. He had to work much harder at homework, re-reading assignments several times to comprehend the material. He was hard on himself, no matter how much we tried to lessen the academic pressure and focus his awareness of his other strengths.

I often told Ryan that there are all kinds of intelligence, for instance: academic, music, physical and social intelligence. I always felt his strength was social intelligence- that his very warm, sweet, caring and sensitive personality would take him far in life because people liked being with him. One of the best compliments we ever received about Ryan was from a parent that said they loved having him over and wanted his sweetness to rub off onto their child.

It was during the fifth grade that we first began to encounter the bullying problem. A certain kid and his friends picked up on Ryan’s academic weaknesses and his poor physical coordination. But since he was not being physically bullied by these boys, only by words, we advised him to just ignore them, walk away and remember that he had good friends to count on. We even went so far as to get him a therapist to further help him develop coping skills and to boost his self-esteem during this school year. By the end of fifth grade he seemed fine and so, based on the therapist’s advice, we stopped the sessions.

Ryan’s middle school, Albert D. Lawton (ADL) in Essex Junction, Vermont had grades 6 through 8 in the same building. It was a bit of a scary transition for Ryan coming in as a very young 6 th grader into a building with some pretty older looking 8 th graders lurking through the hallways. As with his early school years, Ryan still struggled to make average grades. School still was not easy for him and he often brought up the concern of being put back in “sped” (special ed.)

Sure enough, the bullying problem resurfaced on and off during his first middle school year, but never to a point that gave us great concern. Again, we had the conventional adult belief that this was just kids being kids, a part of growing up ... that encountering mean kids in middle school was just inevitable. But the situation got much worse for him during the 7th grade.

In December 2002, the bullying problem surfaced again to a significant level. There was an evening that month when he just had a melt down … a very tearful session at the kitchen table. We thought 7th grade was going fine but discovered he was bottling up a lot of bad experiences during the first few months.  Again, it was the same kid and his friends that bullied him on and off since the 5th grade. They were tormenting him again and he said he hated going to school, that he never wanted to go back there. He asked that night if we could move or home school him.