>They Knew, And Did Next To Nothing

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It all could have been avoided, if only someone had paid attention, and someone had done something about it.

It seems that Phoebe Price, the Massachusetts high school student, who took her own life after being relentlessly bullied by a group of “Mean Girls,” apparently spoke to a school administrator about the abuse she suffered just a week before she killed herself.

New documents have been filed in connection with other charges facing the six South Hadley High School students who literally bullied and tortured Phoebe Price to death. The new documents show just how much school officials knew about the bullying, and reveal just what happened in the last few hours of Phoebe Price’s all-too-short life.

It was on January 14th that Phoebe Price hanged herself in family home, a week to the day since she had gone to a school administrator after learning that one of the defendants, Flannery Mullins, had told fellow students that she was going to “beat Phoebe up” and that she “needed to watch out at break after second block. There is no indication to whom Phoebe spoke, but it is clear that she was begging for help.

Help never came.

Phoebe told the school official that she was “scared and wanted to go home,” but, instead, she was sent back to class, telling a friend that it seemed as though “she was still going to get beat up.”

School superintendent Gus Sayer said school administrators were not aware of the bullying until January 7, when two teachers reported separate bullying incidents to the principal. In one incident, a student walked into Price’s classroom and yelled at her; in the other, a teacher overheard several students making remarks about Price “that appeared to be threatening.”

A week before she killed herself school officials knew these things.

The principal says he took immediate “disciplinary action against both students,” though, citing school privacy rules, he won’t say what action was taken. But it couldn’t have meant much to those that were torturing Phoebe Price, because the bullying intensified over the course of the next seven days, until, no longer able to stand it, feeling that everyone was out to hurt her, seeing that officials wouldn’t offer any help, Phoebe Price gave up.

On her last day, Phoebe Price told a friend that that school “has been close to intolerable lately.” She was in the school library at the same time as three of the charged teens–Sean Mulveyhill, Kayla Narey and Ashley Longe–and witnesses reported that that Prince was subjected to crude sexual taunts from Longe, including, “Irish whore.” As she left school that day, she endured a barrage of name-calling, and, while walking home, a car drove past, and a beverage can was thrown at her. By this time, Phoebe Price was in tears. At home, she exchanged several text messages with a friend for about two hours, talking about the verbal abuse she had received that day and the ongoing taunts.

Later, Phoebe Price’s body was found hanging in a rear stairwell of her family’s apartment.

So, where were the school officials? Why, when one teacher overhears a conversation in which a group of students threatens another, is nothing done? For a full week, they knew that Phoebe Price had been targeted by a band of thugs, and they waited. For what?

Kids can be mean. There are names called, and shoves in the hallways; cruel tricks. But this went too far; this was a daily struggle for Phoebe Price, and when she went to the very people she thought could help her, they let her down.