Anonymous posts on a Formspring account Jamey opened said “Kill your self!!!! You have nothing left!” and “Go kill yourself, you’re worthless, ugly and don’t have a point to live.”
While Jamey had told his parents the taunting he’d endured in middle school had not carried over to high school, he posted online notes ruminating on suicide, bullying, homophobia, and pop singer Lady Gaga.
“People would be like ‘faggot, fag,’ and they’d taunt me in the hallways and I felt like I could never escape it,” he said in a YouTube video posted in May as part of columnist Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project, which seeks to give voices and hope to bullied gay and lesbian teenagers.
After he hanged himself outside his home in suburban Buffalo, activists, journalists, and Gaga herself seized on the suicide, decrying the loss of another promising life to bullying.
Even though no criminal charges will be filed, Askey said there have been other consequences.
“The fact that it can’t be prosecuted shouldn’t be the measuring stick here. I think people know that it’s inappropriate, know that it’s unacceptable. … I think a message has been sent,” Askey said. The bullies’ “friends know who they are and their peers know who they are, and they know that it’s completely unacceptable in the eyes of this community, this police department, and their peers.”
Jamey’s death followed other prominent teenage deaths linked to bullying or intimidation—notably Phoebe Prince, an Irish immigrant in Massachusetts taunted by classmates after she dated a popular boy, and Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman whose roommate is accused of spying on his same-sex encounter via webcam.
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