Bullied teen commits suicide

VANCOUVER—There was an outpouring of condolences on social media following the suspected suicide of a British Columbia teenager who last month posted a gut-wrenching video to YouTube of her treatment at the hands of relentless bullies.
Coroner Barb McLintock said last night that preliminary indications suggest Amanda Todd, 15, took her own life one day earlier.

Todd posted a haunting, black-and-white, nine-minute video on Sept. 7 in which she doesn’t speak, but holds up a series of white pieces of paper with brief sentences in black marker.
On the papers, the teen explains that as a Grade 7 student, she was lured by an unidentified male to expose her breasts via webcam.
One year later, Todd said she got a message from him on Facebook, though she didn’t know how he knew her name or where to find her.
Todd’s notes said the man ordered her to “put on a show for me,” or he would send around the webcam pictures. Todd said he knew her address, her school, her friends, and her family.
She said she later was alerted by police that he had followed through with the threat.
“I then got really sick,” she wrote.
She noted she was plunged into anxiety, major depression, drugs, and alcohol. But the bullying didn’t stop. She said the man created a Facebook page with a list of her friends and school.
“My boobs were his profile picture,” she wrote.
“I can never get that photo back. It’s out there forever.”
Todd wrote that she eventually changed schools and things were better for a while. But she said an encounter with another girl’s boyfriend started the bullying again, this time worse.
It escalated into a physical attack in which she said she was beaten and left in a ditch until her father found her.
She said she tried to kill herself twice, including once by drinking bleach, and constantly cut herself.
The video ends with her note: “I have nobody. I need someone.”
Beneath the video, though, Todd posted a note saying she produced it not for attention, but “to be an inspiration and to show that I can be strong.”
“Everyone’s future will be bright one day, you just gotta pull through. I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Meantime, B.C. Premier Christy Clark posted her video yesterday. In the grainy production, Clark said she had just heard about the death and wanted to pass on condolences.
“No one deserves to be bullied,” she said. “No one earns it, no one asks for it, it isn’t a rite of passage.
“Bullying has to stop,” she stressed. “Every child, everyone, needs to be able to feel safe at school.”
Shock and sadness, but also anger, poured out on a Facebook page devoted to Todd.
“This is really sad,” read one post written by someone identified as Taylor Sjostrand.
“It was painful to see the kids who made fun of her write on her Facebook ‘RIP, you will be missed, we loved you.’
“Why would you say that when YOU’RE the reason she’s gone.
“They have no remorse, let alone any idea what they did. “
Another post, by someone writing as Nathan Mullin, noted the hypocrisy in the outpouring for Todd in death when there appeared to be little help for her in life.
“Where was all this support when she was suffering?” he wondered.