“[His] death cannot go by with no meaning at all.”

“[His] death cannot go by with no meaning at all.” May 23, 2017

from pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/sling-hangman-hanging-knot-1222466/

The front-page story in today’s paper:  “Naperville teen’s senseless tragedy: ‘They scared him to death’.”  It reports on a Naperville teenager, Corey Walgren, who committed suicide after being confronted by a school official and a police officer over a recording he made, and reportedly shared with others, of a sexual encounter — the girl on the recording had made the complaint, and, as it happened, the video was not viewable, so that it was, functionally, an audio recording only (whether she knew that or not is unknown).

The article contains, by and large, the usual rose-tinted profile — he had never been in “serious” trouble before, he was notable for playing hockey without penalties, he was on the honor roll, he had a group of tight-knit friends, and so on.  Then the article details the police visit — he was pulled into an office during lunch at school, the school dean and the officer asked to look at his phone and found the video in question, they talked to him for 18 minutes, then called his parents and discussed the matter with his mother by phone (she was at work), at which point the officer suggested the matter might be handled by a “station adjustment” – that is, an informal agreement to do community service or the like rather than going through the formal juvenile system.  The boy was then escorted to an office waiting area to wait for his mom to leave work and come to the school to sign some paperwork, but he walked away, and was finally found after he jumped off the top of a parking garage.

Doug and Maureen Walgren plan to file a lawsuit against both the school district and the police department. They hope legal action will spur the school and police to rethink how they handle future incidents involving minors.

“There has to be a change in their policy and their procedures,” Maureen Walgren said. “Corey’s death cannot go by with no meaning at all.”

What exactly is their complaint?  What do they think the school district and police department did wrong?  The article says that the police failed to contact the parents soon enough — that various legal “guidelines” state that unless the student is an immediate danger to others or immediate action is needed to prevent destruction of others, the parents should be contacted before the police has any contact with the student.

Would this have made a difference?  It seems to me that having a parent on the phone when being confronted by the police, or having to wait while mom leaves work, sitting, mind racing about the consequences, could have made it worse.  Or is the lawsuit claiming that the boy shouldn’t have been able to walk away but should have been under close supervision?  Or that, indeed, they should have never pursued the matter in the first place?  (There was a real girl that was harmed by his actions.)

This chain of events suggests to me, more than anything else, that the picture-perfect life the article portrays, was not truly the case.  Perhaps it is indeed the case that otherwise “normal” kids, with no mental health issues or other problems with their lives, when confronted by something sudden that they don’t know how to cope with, are in fact at risk of suicide (though I doubt that suicide-prevention is the objective of the “call the parents” rule).  But it just seems unlikely — and, what’s more, though I get that it’s a coping mechanism, the notion of pursuing a lawsuit in order to have a suicide “mean something” doesn’t sit well with me at all.

After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that everyone was talking about the “13 Reasons Why” Netflix show — criticizing the implicit message that committing suicide can “accomplish” something, even if it’s just exacting revenge on people who think have wronged you.  In fact, it’s still in the news:  the New York Post, for instance, reports on parents claiming that the story inspired their son to kill himself.

And it’s something that shows up more that it should – the idea that a suicide can be meaningful.  There was a CNN report a while back that I blogged about, in which a transgender teen committed suicide, with the seeming objective both to punish the parents and to bring about social change.  The Robin Williams case, too, seemed to have a fair bit of reaction that he had a “good reason” to kill himself.  And the suicide rate in the US is rising (though still not as high as in other countries — according to WHO, we rank 48th) — remember that suicide outranks breast cancer as a cause of “premature” death.

Now, I know that causes of suicide are complex, and have to do with mental illness and also the increasing precariousness of working-class lives, but I worry that we’ve lost the ability to say that suicide is simply wrong, and that this cultural “brake” on suicide is gone and we’re left trying to reason our way out of it.

Image: from pixabay, https://pixabay.com/en/sling-hangman-hanging-knot-1222466/


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