Anatomy of a Suicide Note

Chapter 14

One of the most important things I've learned throughout my career is that everybody has an important story to tell. It's how they decide to tell it that leaves their mark upon the world. Whenever I've been asked to prepare the body of yet another suicide victim, I've never thought their suicide note was what told their story. That small piece of the puzzle only told the part of the story they wanted you to know.

Do I mean to say that the suicide note is a lie, deception, or a fraud of some sort? No, not in the least, but it can certainly give us some pause to push us toward investigating their deaths further. But the problem with being an unfortunate suicide victim is that once your death has been declared a suicide, there is rarely an official investigation that continues. That is, unless you're an elementary school student whose parents feel their child might have lived if it wasn't for the school's unwillingness to step in.

That was the case of Jeremy Case, an eight-year-old third-grader with a serious developmental delay. Today, we'd call him autistic, but back then, we didn't understand as much about autism as we do now.

When Jeremy was a baby, he'd been diagnosed as having developmental delays because of how slow his physical progress was. He crawled late. He walked late. And a short time after he spoke his first words, he stopped talking altogether. That was when his parents enrolled him in a developmental pre-school that engaged him in speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy. Through his work with his therapists, he made great progress by the time he was old enough to attend a traditional elementary school program, but there was still some social awkwardness that lingered. And if you remember anything about school at that age, you'll also remember how cruel some kids can be toward their peers who act or appear different.

The Case family lived in a lower-income neighborhood filled mostly with rental houses, which generally meant most families didn't live too long in the neighborhood. And one thing that was different about this neighborhood was that there weren't a lot of children Jeremy's age for him to play with. And the ones who did live there didn't like playing with him because they thought he was too weird. That is, until Liza Dexter moved a few houses down from the Case family.

Little Liza was not a nice girl, but it wasn't entirely her fault. As much as she bullied little Jeremy, her parents bullied her as well. So, you see, this kind of behavior generally flows in a circle. People like this generally think, If I'm in pain, everyone else must suffer too. It's not always by choice, but it seems to happen way too often.

One day, Robert Case received a call from the school—Jeremy had never shown up. They looked all over for him until they received a call from the police department. They found Jeremy hanging from a tree, naked, and barely alive. Liza sat underneath him, throwing rocks at his badly bruised body. Ever since that day, Jeremy was never the same boy, and even worse—the bullying seemed to worsen at Liza's command. The other students knew if they didn't do what she said, then the same thing might happen to them.

It's hard to imagine that life is this rough for children at school, a place they are supposed to feel safe and protected in. An elementary school, of all places, is supposed to be a safe haven that looks out for kids when their parents can't be there to protect them. The Cases' lawyer argued that the school had been fully aware of the bullying, yet they did nothing to stop it. For a family mourning the loss of their child that had just committed suicide, that was an even worse crime than the bullying itself.

By the time the trial finished, East Hills Elementary School had shut its doors and was transformed into a resource center for a new organization Robert and Jessica Case set up with the settlement money—Oklahoma Remembers Jeremy (OKRJ). And it was also their plan to set up one of these research and resource centers in every state, providing local after-school programs for kids who were at risk for bullying.

For the rest of their lives, Robert and Jessica would remember that awful site of Jeremy's young body floating in a bathtub of blood. Forever burned in their mind, they were determined to make his suicide mean something. I wanted to make his death mean something too. After his funeral, I made a point to donate 10% of my salary to their organization. I did that up until I retired and planned to do so once I became a successful author. That is, unless that retirement plan ended with a bullet in my head at that library.