The known facts are
- Tyler's privacy was invaded by roommates Ravi & Molly
- He was filmed having sex without his permission
- Not only that the tape was publicly broadcast without his permission
Legally
- Invasion of privacy is a crime
- The fact that the invasion was in relation to sexual intimacy makes the crime of a higher degree
- Broadcasting such a tape publicly amounts to illegal po*nography
This part of the case is clear cut. Whether he is gay or not, is irrelevant. It's a clear crime. It would have been the exact same crime if a heterosexual couples privacy was invaded or if one gay partner recorded and broadcast another without consent.
The complication to the case is that Tyler committed suicide. The question arises if the invasion of privacy, the recording of intercourse and/or the consequent broadcast caused the suicide. If so how culpable are Ravi and Molly who drove committed the prior crime. Let's forget that Tyler is gay. Anyone could have committed suicide over a sex tape. Tyler could have been religious, very self conscious and shy and it can drive such a person to embarrassment. We have already heard of news stories of girls committing suicide with consensual images being passed around by their boyfriends. So if Tyler had a girlfriend she could have felt compelled to do so too.
So no matter what Ravi & Molly are indirectly responsible for emotionally pushing a person towards suicide. They are responsible for negligent homicide or wrongful death. The prosecution and defense will negotiate what degree and for what punishment should they be charged.
The biggest complication comes in fact with the Matthew Shepard Act being a law (an act that will probably need revision in the future). The hate crime legislation does not only protect gay people but any minority who is exclusively targeted by groups through verbal and physical assault. This is why Tyler's homosexuality poses more questions in this case. Did his homosexuality have anything to do with the crime? Would Molly and Ravi have done this if he were straight? Were they trying to out him and embarrass him over his sexuality? Or are Molly and Ravi just two boneheads who think recording and broadcasting a roommate having sex is a hilarious prank? If his homosexuality was the cause of suicide were Ravi and Molly solely responsible – or was he more afraid of parents, other people he felt threatened by? Was there additional anti homosexual slurs and comments involved anywhere?
I'm not aware of all the stipulations of Matthew Shepard act, or if the prosecution will want to try and evoke it. However, the punishment for negligent homicide and homicide (as well as other crimes) that fall under the category hate crime get harsher sentencing. Whether it is a hate crime or not is not proven, nor do we know what role Tyler's homosexuality plays in the whole scenario. These are the grey areas for now. The police investigating the crime will have to thoroughly and objectively find all the facts.
It will be an interesting case. I'm sure Dick Wolf will pen it into screenplay sometime in the near future.
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 "s**tty 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.
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 "s**tty Jana" or "s**t-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."
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.
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."
___
Associated Press writer Jeannie Nuss in Columbus contributed to this report.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- They were roaming the halls of South Philadelphia High School looking for a fight. Their target, according to police: Asian students.
By the end of the school day, as many as 30 students of Asian descent had been physically attacked and many were sent to the hospital for treatment, according to school and law enforcement officials.
Wei Chen, who was a senior at the time, remembers December 3, 2009, like it was yesterday.
"They were sitting along the wall," he recalled. "I saw the one student, his whole T-shirt [was bloody] because his nose is broken."
Wei was not injured in last year's melee, but he said the violence was racial tension between black and Asian immigrant students reaching its breaking point.
After being attacked as a freshman and witnessing other attacks on Asian students, Wei founded the Chinese Student Association to help new Chinese students -- many who recently immigrated to the country -- adjust to life at South Philly High. He also kept track of the incidents of violence against Asian students.
Last year's altercation was the final straw.
Wei and 50 other students organized an eight-day boycott of the school. They wanted to draw attention to what they felt was an inadequate response by the school staff to the ongoing harassment and violence leading up to the December 3 incident.
"School should be safe," he said. "The school should be responsible for students' safety. This is important."
Bach Tong, a native of Vietnam, was one of the students who participated in the boycott. He said standing up for what he believed in helped him find his voice.
"You know, I see not everyone speak up, so I need to stand up for myself 'cause I see myself in there, I see trouble in there," said Tong, who was a sophomore at the time of the incident.
"I cannot be selfish and stay aside to watch other people fixing stuff for me. I mean, I need to stand up and [fix] stuff for myself."
During those eight days, Wei, Tong and the other students met in Philadelphia's Chinatown neighborhood during school hours, doing their schoolwork, holding rallies, and talking about ways to deal with violence at the school.
Despite taking a stand, Tong transferred out of South Philly High a year later, fearing for his safety and concerned about his education.
Nevertheless, the boycott helped trigger nationwide attention to the violence against Asian students at South Philly High. Months later, a federal investigation was launched following a formal civil rights complaint filed by the Asian American Legal Defense Fund.
"It's huge," said Cecilia Chen, staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense Fund.
"It's basically the federal government coming in and saying that the school district has failed to protect the constitutional rights of its students, which they have an obligation to do," Chen said.
According to the complaint, "the District and the School acted with 'deliberate indifference' to the harassment against Asian students and 'intentional disregard for the welfare of Asian students'" at the school.
The
Justice Department, which announced its investigation in August, has
instructed the school system to improve the treatment of Asian students.
And today, the perception among students and their families is that things are slowly changing.
The school's principal resigned in May, security has been increased, and the school district has said there have been fewer reports of student assaults.
The superintendent of schools did not return CNN's calls for a comment, but the school's new principal, Otis Hackney, says security at South Philly High is his top priority.
"There is no room for bullying at school," Hackney said in a recent phone interview. "As principal, my No. 1 priority is to make sure my building is safe."
Hackney is the fifth principal in six years at South Philly High.
A West Philadelphia native, Hackney wants his school off the state's "persistently dangerous" list, as well as meeting the Adequate Yearly Progress requirements, something his school has not achieved, he said.
Hackney used education "to change his situation," he said. "I care because I was built this way," he said. "I just truly see education as the way."
Next month, South Philly High students will launch a campaign for nonviolent schools with the help of the city's youth-led Philadelphia Student Union.
The campaign seeks to improve school climate and enhance the trust between students and staff.
Student Union member Shania Morris was in the eighth grade when last December's violence erupted at South Philly.
Moved by the boycott, she wanted to make a difference in schools.
"We just want to fight to make a change in our schools so that they're nonviolent," said Morris, now a high school freshman. "What we believe is that nonviolence is power that helps people rather than hurts."
While things have improved, it is a bittersweet accomplishment, says advocate Helen Gym, a board member for Asian Americans United.
"For all the wonderful students that we've worked with who stood up around the issue, we've lost dozens more," said Gym, who helped many Asian students document their experiences.
"Kids who just dropped out, kids who just gave up, kids who are lost. You know this is some small consolation, but ... we lost a generation of kids."
But for Wei Chen, who now attends Community College of Philadelphia, speaking out helped him find his inner strength.
"We have the power to change; we can do something," he said. "It's not only adults who can do something, we can do something. I trust this."
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/10/22/philly.school.asian.american.attacks/index.html
(CNN) -- At age 13, Hope Witsell struggled in middle school. Not because her class work at Shields Middle School in Ruskin, Florida, was challenging, but because Hope was being bullied.
Her friend, Kyla Stich, told CNN that fellow students would "walk up to her and call her 's**t,' 'wh**e,' and they would sometimes, they would call her 'skank' and just be really cruel to her."
Another friend, Lexi Leber, said, "We had to make like a wall, we had people surrounding her, and she had to be in the middle because people would come by and try to hit her and push her into a locker or something.
"She was afraid to walk alone, she was afraid someone would do something to her, like verbally attack her, so she would always have someone with her," Leber added.
This all started in the spring of 2009 during the last week of school.
Friends and family say Hope had "sexted" a picture of her breasts to her boyfriend. Another girl from school, they say, got her hands on the photo and sent it to students at six different schools in the area.
Before Hope could do anything to stop it, that photo had gone viral.
The school alerted Hope's parents. Her mother, Donna Witsell, told CNN how she learned about the photo.
"The assistant principal had a meeting with my husband and I and pretty much told us that he did not see the image but that he had heard that it was Hope and when he confronted Hope, Hope did not deny it. She wasn't proud of it but she didn't lie," Hope's mother said.
Mrs. Witsell says she had warned her daughter about the dark side of technology, about "some of the pretty sexual images of young girls and guys."
She added, "Hope was very aware of that, of inappropriate dress and most definitely posing."
Still, because of that photo, Hope had become a target for 11-, 12-, and 13-year-old bullies.
But she didn't share her pain with her parents.
Even when bullies wrote horrible things about Hope on a MySpace page called the "Shields Middle School Burn Book" and started a "Hope Hater Page," the young girl kept silent.
Summer provided a bit of a break, but when the new school year began, the taunting was even worse.
On Saturday, September 12, 2009, Hope Witsell helped her father mow the lawn. They cooked a special seafood dinner together as a family. Then Hope disappeared to her room upstairs. Her parents stayed downstairs and watched TV.
Donna Witsell will never forget the moment she went to say goodnight to her daughter.
"I went upstairs to go in her room and kiss her goodnight. That was when I found her. I screamed for my husband. And started doing CPR."
It was too late. Hope was already dead. She had used her favorite scarves to hang herself from her canopy bed.
After Hope died, her mother learned her daughter had been summoned to meet with a school social worker. A spokesperson for the school says the social worker was concerned Hope might have been trying to hurt herself, so she had Hope sign what's called a "no harm" contract in which Hope agreed to talk to an adult if she wanted to harm herself.
Hope's mother says she was never told about the contract, which she found crumpled up in the garbage in her daughter's bedroom after she died.
School officials told CNN they believed the social worker had tried calling Hope's mother to alert her but weren't sure if she had left a message.
"The school dropped the ball," Donna Witsell said.
"The school did not call. We have the digital telephone; we have the cell phones that indicate when there was an incoming call and what number was calling in. We have a house phone, I have a cell phone, my husband has a cell phone. We have emergency contact numbers at the school which was my sister-in-law and her husband. There was no indication that the school called any of those numbers," Hope's mother said.
Days after Hope died, her older sister, Samantha Beattie, discovered the bullying was still going on. Even in death, Hope could not escape it.
"I knew she had MySpace and Facebook. There were people putting comments on there: 'Did Hope really kill herself?' 'I can't believe that wh**e did that.' Just obscene things that I would never expect from a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old," said Samantha.
In the year or so that has passed since Hope Witsell took her own life, her mother has started a group called Hope's Warriors. She hopes it will help combat bullying and save other moms from feeling the horrendous pain that she feels.
Donna Witsell has a message for parents: "It happened to my daughter, it can happen to yours too. No one is untouchable. No one is untouchable."
This and many more links against bullies of all kinds against races, against special ed students, against religious minority. http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/bullying/
