While You Were Sleeping: Gabriel Taye Suicide

Ugh. I have been putting this one out just because it made me miserable to know. This is about a kid named Gabriel Taye that was bullied in school. Unlike a lot of other stories where a kid is bullied and brings a gun from home to school and kills folks this 8 year old ended up hanging himself at home. Of course none of the people that should take any form of responsibility for this has or will. A couple of days before he killed himself he was attacked by another student at school. There is video of this if you wanted to know. This other kid, that should be in some kinda juvenile center if you ask me, shoved Taye into a wall knocking him unconscious.

While he was laying on the ground for about five minutes other kids came by and nudged him, laughed, and even a school official who was right by him didn't notice him on the ground. The school didn't tell his mother, Cornelia Reynolds, that he was attacked of knocked unconscious at school. They just said that he fainted. The case is reopening because after he had killed himself it was treated as very open and shut. The county coroner, Lakshmi Sammarco, requested that the police open this case back up and implied that it could be a homicide. “There's enough information here that we would like to reopen the case to look at whether we need to amend the death certificate. It was very hard for me to believe that an 8-year-old would even know what it means to commit suicide and so I asked Cincinnati police to treat this as a homicide until proven otherwise and investigate it fully.”

A nurse at the school says that Taye was checked an said that he was in “normal” condition. It is also being reported that the nurse told Taye's mother to take him to a hospital immediately. This is where the stories begin to differ. Reynolds' lawyer stated “On the eve of Mother’s Day, it is unfortunate that CPS chose to blame Gabe's mother for not taking him to the hospital after he was injured at school. No one from CPS told Gabe's mother that she needed to take him to the hospital. The nurse's notes verify this. In fact, if his mother had been told that (he) was assaulted and was unconscious for over seven minutes on the bathroom floor, she would have taken him to the hospital and not let him return to Carson. It is helpful that CPS did not deny that Carson officials withheld this vital information from Gabe's mother.”

After his mother picked him up from school Taye was sick and vomited twice during the night. Sounds like a concussion to me. I've had a few. His mother then took him to the hospital and he was released the next morning and the hospital said he had stomach flu. He stayed home that day, went to school the next, and killed himself the next by hanging himself with a necktie after coming home from school. His mother stated “I guess he didn’t know how to tell me stuff was happening. Him going to the nurse's station or him not wanting to go to school, that was his way of trying to communicate with me. That was his way. He probably didn't want to say, 'Ma, somebody's bullying or picking on me,' you know? He just didn't know how to tell me.”

The family lawyer said “If the school had told mom that 'your son was assaulted,' 'your son had lost consciousness for seven minutes,' she would have immediately taken him to the hospital and had him examined. She's devastated that her son's second-to-last day was so painful for him and that she didn't know and that she couldn't protect him.” By the way, suicide is the second leading cause of death of people between 10 and 24 in the nation. “It is my obligation to make sure that this will never happen again” Reynolds said. “No, this will not go away. People need to know the truth and help fix this epidemic in our society by spreading awareness and speaking up.”

I have to say, it is hard to speak up to your parents about being bullied. When I was bullied as a child I didn't tell anyone and ended up just fighting people or hitting them once and they stopped. Most times its some kid that gets his ass kicked at home and decides to take it out on kids at school. Sometimes a kid is just an asshole garbage human being but we don't want to admit that. There are some shitty kids in the world and we need to stop denying it. Being bullied sucks. I know that should go without saying but that shit can stick with you for the rest of your life. There are times when I think of a kid named Kerry that used to fuck with me and my cousins until one day he got in my face and I swung and nailed him in the jaw. Of course I ran to a teacher, turned on the water works, and he got in trouble. Never messed with us again. Know why? His parents were called and he probably got his ass beat when he got home. Fight fire with fire as the great poets Metallica once said.

If you have a kid and they are being bullied chances are they will never tell you. Why? Because they don't trust you. I should probably put that another way. They don't trust that you will be able to do something helpful. Back in the 80's parents would come to schools and physically threaten other kids and it was fine. Why? Because teachers could hit kids back then. Maybe it was just in the LAUSD. Either way, everybody was getting hit by someone and you knew which kids weren't because they were assholes that did things that would get you hit so you knew not to do them. I still see this behavior every time I see a kid in the wild.

Kids think that you, a parent, are going to come to the school and embarrass them. Now they are not only being bullied, they are being made fun of. So they keep it inside and let it build until they snap on someone that did something not even worth getting that upset about. Or, like Gabriel, they take it out on themselves. Parents will wonder what they could've done and why they didn't see the signs. And it sucks for them. It really does. Schools can't stop bullying because bullying never really ends. It doesn't help that non-bully events happen and get called bullying. The world is a huge tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf so when shit gets really real people don't act on it.

The only actual way to stop shit like this from happening is to raise non-shitty people. So much of what we end up turning into as adults come from how we were treated as children. More than we'd like to admit. Parents also need to recognize the way they treat and talk to their children. Kids aren't servants or robots. They won't be kids forever. Your bad parenting will crank out a bad adult. I see so many parents around my age with kids and somehow this age group is the shittiest group of parents in a long ass time. They don't want to let go of their youth and still want to party like their kids are and even dress like them. Me? No need to be more adult than I am. I have no kids and am not responsible for anyone but me and my plants. I got some Macho Man Jordan's arriving tomorrow and plans to hunt for new doughnut spots. But if I did have a kid I would know all of their friends, their friends parents (whether I wanted to or not), and how they are doing in school and not waiting till I got a report card. In closing, don't have kids you can't raise to not be assholes that cause children to want to die.

Click here for previous While You Were Sleeping.