Parents Sue After Bullied Teen Commits Suicide via Jezebel The parents of a teenage boy who committed suicide after being targeted by bullies filed a lawsuit against district where he attended school, alleging officials knew their son was being targeted but did nothing to protect him. Matthew Burdette’s parents are suing the San Diego Unified School District after a video of the teen masturbating went viral, leading to severe bullying that caused their son to take his life. The Burdettes allege school officials at University City High School where Matthew,14, attended knew about the video and the bullying yet did nothing to intervene. Matthew killed himself during the Thanksgiving holiday in 2013. He left behind a suicide note for his family that shed light on the harassment he was enduring from classmates. “He said, I can’t do school anymore,” Matthew’s aunt Laura Burdette Mechak said to ABC 10. “I have no friends. I don’t want to kill myself but I have no friends.” After his death, family members turned to University City High School looking for answers. What could have happened at school to drive their son, a Boy Scout and member of the wrestling team, to kill himself? Mechak said school officials refused to give them any insight into what was going on with Matthew. “Kids came forward to help them figure out what was going on,” she told ABC 10. It was then that the family first became aware of the video. After months of investigating, this is what the family knows so far. On Nov. 15, Matthew was kicked out of a classroom for eating sunflower seeds. His teacher gave him no direction on where to go or what to do (she didn’t send him to the principal’s office; she just told him to leave the class). That’s when he went to the bathroom and reportedly began to masturbate in one of stalls. At that point, another student entered the bathroom and peered over the door. He used his phone to record Matthew masturbating. Video taping someone engaging in a sexual act without their consent is disturbing and completely horrifying on its own, but don’t forget this is the age where everything gets shared on the Internet. Sure enough, the student immediately shared the footage via Snapchat and other social media sites. That’s where Matthew’s nightmare began. I don’t think we have to explain that high school students and sexually explicit material are a bad combination which only seem to lead to brutal torment from teenagers. As you can imagine, Matthew was relentlessly teased about the video. Mechak detailed the extent of the teasing, which went way past a few schoolyard bullies. “It went viral. It went beyond his school,” she said. “It went to other schools in California. Kids in the neighborhood who didn’t go to Matthew’s school had heard about it and seen the video that was taken of him. After two weeks of the bullying, Matthew reached his breaking point. His body was found on Nov. 29.
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Lawsuits: Parents Sue Over Bullied Teen Who Committed Suicide After Video Of Him Pleasuring Himself Went Viral
