Jamey Rodemeyer

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WILLIAMSVILLE, NEW YORK – The Williamsville Central School District concluded its investigation into the Jamey Rodemeyer case last week by suspending some North High School students after Amherst police closed their criminal investigation Nov. 22 without filing charges.
“[The police] shared some information with us, and we followed up,” Superintendent Scott Martzloff said. “We made the determination to take disciplinary action.”
He declined to say how many students were suspended. Though based on Amherst police findings, it’s likely that several of Jamey’s classmates were sanctioned.
Regarding the severity of punishments these students received, Martzloff said only that the students face “a minimum of suspensions.” That implies at least short-term suspensions of up to five days, with the possibility of long-term suspensions subject to a hearing. Expulsion is not an option for students of this age.
Martzloff said that after following up on the police findings, the district issued the student sanctions Wednesday.
“We want to thank the Amherst Police Department for their thorough investigation,” he said, “and our condolences continue to go out to the Rodemeyer family.”
Although the Williamsville Central School District has received a lot of attention because Jamey was a North High freshman at the time of his death, police, school and legal officials have said the reasons behind Jamey’s suicide appear far broader than just bullying by classmates.
Jamey had also blogged about experiencing a variety of personal problems in his life outside of school in the weeks leading up to his death.
Police Chief John C. Askey had previously stated that his department’s investigation turned up five incidents of alleged bullying at Williamsville North involving Jamey. The freshman killed himself Sept. 18 after complaining in online videos and posts about being bullied over his sexual orientation.
Askey said none of the incidents at North High were brought to the school’s attention or Jamey’s parents’ attention until after Jamey had died and police began investigating.
The district based its disciplinary actions on the Amherst Police Department’s incident findings, previously reported by The Buffalo News. Among them:
A witness said one female classmate who had known Jamey since middle school told Jamey something along the lines of, “Faggot, why don’t you just kill yourself?” This student’s family hired a lawyer shortly after she began being questioned by police.
In a separate incident, the same student later told Jamey something like, “You’re a faggot.”
Another identified student pushed Jamey as he passed him in the hallway and called him a fag.
Yet another identified student made “an inappropriate comment” to Jamey regarding his sexual orientation, Askey said.
Jamey had previously reported in his blog that a group of North classmates had spit on a plate of brownies and given them to him in the cafeteria. Askey said investigators found no witnesses who actually saw any brownies being spit on.
The disciplinary actions taken last week are not the first the Williamsville school district has meted out in relation to Jamey’s case.
In September, a female student was suspended for telling friends of Jamey’s sister, Alyssa, at an outdoor homecoming dance that she was glad Jamey was dead. The same student was referenced in at least two of the bullying incidents involving Jamey that police investigated.
from The Buffalo News
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Jamey Rodemeyer

AMHERST, NEW YORK – Police investigating the suicide of a bullied gay teenager said Tuesday that offensive comments he endured online and at school couldn’t be considered criminal and that no charges would be filed.
Amherst investigators last month sent 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer’s computer and cellphone to a forensics lab to help determine whether anyone should be prosecuted for the bullying he often talked about before taking his life Sept. 18. They also interviewed Jamey’s family, friends and peers, uncovering five bullying episodes at Williamsville North High School, where he’d just begun his freshman year, Chief John Askey said.
“He was exposed to stresses in every facet of his life that were beyond what should be experienced by a 14-year-old boy,” Askey told reporters during a news conference at police headquarters.
But neither the in-school bullying episodes, one of which involved pushing and an anti-gay remark, nor “insensitive and inappropriate” online comments were found to be prosecutable, Askey said, in part because the victim is dead and unable to help prove harassment or other charges that might have been filed.
“I’m not satisfied, to be honest,” said Askey, adding that officers had devoted hundreds of hours to the investigation. “I would like to have seen something we could have done from a prosecution standpoint.”
Jamey’s father, Timothy Rodemeyer, had a similar response.
“We’re not satisfied, but we somewhat expected this outcome,” he told The Associated Press by phone after the press conference. “That’s why we’ve taken on a mission trying to get laws passed that will make people accountable.”
The investigation determined that three students had targeted Jamey in high school, one of whom hired a lawyer after Jamey’s death. Those students weren’t the ones commenting inappropriately in online forums, the investigation determined.
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.
from The Associated Press
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Zachary Quinto

For eight months last year, Zachary Quinto headlined an off-Broadway revival of Angels in America, playing a gay man who abandons his AIDS-stricken boyfriend. The role, he says in a new interview with New York magazine, helped him realize how lucky he was to be a gay man in this generation.
While his sexuality has been questioned and picked at in the tabloids over the years, Star Trek’s Spock and the Heroes villain has never publicly addressed the rumors. He has, however, played many gay roles (on Tori Spelling’s So NoTORIous and on the new FX series American Horror Story) and been an outspoken advocate of equal rights. Last October when Angels premiered, Quinto filmed an emotional video for “It Gets Better,” a campaign aimed at ending the antigay bullying that has led many gay teens to suicide.
His role in Angels, Quinto, 34, says, was both “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done as an actor and the most rewarding.”
“At the same time,” he adds, “as a gay man, it made me feel like there’s still so much work to be done, and there’s still so many things that need to be looked at and addressed.”
Later, when speaking about the recent positive changes for the gay community (the legalization of gay marriage in New York) being qualified by the backwards steps of continued gay bullying and suicide of gay teenager Jamey Rodemeyer, Quinto adds that it affects him personally.
“Again, as a gay man I look at that and say there’s a hopelessness that surrounds it, but as a human being I look at it and say ‘Why? Where’s this disparity coming from, and why can’t we as a culture and society dig deeper to examine that?’ We’re terrified of facing ourselves.”
When the article was published, Quinto posted a blog on his website, explaining why he decided now was the right time to come out publicly.
“In light of Jamey’s death,” he writes, “it became clear to me in an instant that living a gay life without publicly acknowledging it is simply not enough to make any significant contribution to the immense work that lies ahead on the road to complete equality.”
“I believe in the power of intention to change the landscape of our society, and it is my intention to live an authentic life of compassion and integrity and action,” he continues. “Jamey Rodemeyer’s life changed mine. And while his death only makes me wish that I had done this sooner, I am eternally grateful to him for being the catalyst for change within me. Now I can only hope to serve as the same catalyst for even one other person in this world.”
Quinto is currently in theaters in a small role in What’s Your Number?—playing a boyfriend of Anna Faris—and will be seen later this month playing a gay dead owner of the haunted house in American Horror Story on FX. His new movie, Margin Call, which he co-produced and stars opposite Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany and Jeremy Irons, opens October 21.
from The Hollywood Reporter
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Jamey Rodemeyer

Weeks after the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer in western New York, school officials, police and lawmakers are grappling with ways to prevent the kind of schoolyard bullying being blamed for his death.
The openly gay teen’s parents Tim and Tracy Rodemeyer are calling for changes in how New York schools handle the kind of chronic harassment that drove their son to kill himself outside their suburban Buffalo home on September 19.
“It’s the only thing that’s keeping us going, to try and get the word out,” Tracy Rodemeyer told Reuters.
Already the move has resulted in proposed state legislation aimed at stopping online taunts, known as cyber-bullying.
It comes in the wake of neighboring New Jersey enacting the nation’s toughest anti-bullying law after the suicide last year of a gay Rutgers University student who was bullied.
At the start of this school year, New Jersey officials worried tight budgets might make it difficult to uphold the law, which requires a uniform response to each and every incidence of bullying, including corrective action plans and time frames for intervention.
In Buffalo, meanwhile, a painful reminder that little has changed came last week when a student at the school Rodemeyer attended was suspended for continued taunting of the teen even after his death.
This time the target was his 16-year-old sister at a school dance just hours after she attended a wake for her younger brother on September 22.
“It sickens me,” their father said of reports that some students chanted “better off dead” when dance organizers played a song in Rodemeyer’s honor by his favorite singer, Lady Gaga, who has memorialized him in her anti-bullying comments.
“Your mind just spins at 100 miles per hour. How can someone do that? I don’t understand how someone could be so cruel,” Tracy Rodemeyer said.
“Everybody has a story about bullying but never, never have I ever seen it where somebody would be happy that someone is dead from their actions.”
Superintendent Scott Martzloff posted a message on the district’s web site condemning the dance incident and saying a student believed to be responsible was suspended.
Police continue to investigate Rodemeyer’s death to determine if criminal charges should be brought against some of the teens accused of harassing him, officials said.
The high school freshman had talked to his mother about being gay for the first time about a year ago. In May, he contributed an online video to an international campaign called “It Gets Better,” designed to help young gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people confirm their identity and survive the pitfalls of being different.
She said the teasing that followed Rodemeyer through grade school and into high school included taunts of “fag” and “girly girl” hurled at the boy who kept mostly female friends.
While his online message in May was one of hope, his mother said it is clear now that he put up a strong front to hide the deep hurt within.
School guidance counselors and social workers met with Rodemeyer over the years but none seemed to strive to help him, his father said. One counselor’s advice was simply to stop spending time with girls, he said.
One big problem is that harassment may seem endless for some teens, deepening their despair, said Dr. Stuart Green, of the New Jersey Coalition for Bullying Awareness, who helped draft the New Jersey anti-bullying legislation.
“In 12 years of taking phone calls from parents I’ve never once gotten a call where a parent was upset about something that happened yesterday. It’s months and years,” he said.
The proposed legislation in New York to make it easier to prosecute online bullying is aimed at creating a “chilling effect” to discourage the harassment, said Rich Azzopardi, spokesman for state Senator Jeffrey Klein, author of the bill.
“Years ago, drunken driving wasn’t viewed as a big deal, even though it has the potential to kill people. What we’re doing with bullying is changing people’s perception of it,” Azzopardi said.
For the Rodemeyers, that shift can’t come soon enough.
“We’re really supposed to be learning from our mistakes and this is the next biggest one,” Tracy Rodemeyer said.
from Reuters
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Teen Suicide Over Gay Bullying

Five months ago, Jamey Rodemeyer, a Buffalo junior high school student, got on his webcam and created a video urging other gay teenagers to remain hopeful in the face of bullying.
The 14-year-old spoke of coming out as bisexual and enduring taunts and slurs at school. And he described, in at times desperate tones, rejection and ridicule from other teenagers.
Jamey made the video as part of the It Gets Better project, a campaign that was started last fall to give hope to bullied gay teenagers. “All you have to do is hold your head up and you’ll go far,” he said. “Just love yourself and you’re set. … It gets better.”
But for Jamey, the struggle apparently was just too much. This week his parents announced that their son was found dead, an apparent suicide. He didn’t leave a note, but his parents said he had endured “constant taunting, from the same people over and over.” They added that his school had intervened to help, and that Jamey appeared to be benefiting from counseling.
News that a bullied teenager had succumbed to the very pressures he urged others to resist came as a shock to supporters of the It Gets Better project. And it provided a sobering reminder that bullied teenagers who appear to be adjusting may still be in trouble.
Dan Savage, the advice columnist and co-founder of It Gets Better, noted on his blog on Tuesday that Jamey’s death showed that “sometimes, the damage done by hate and by haters is simply too great.”
It sounds like Jamey had help — he was seeing a therapist and a social worker and his family was supportive — but it wasn’t enough. Whatever help Jamey was getting clearly wasn’t enough to counteract the hatred and abuse that he had endured since the fifth grade, according to reports, or Jamey’s fears of having to face down a whole new set of bullies when he started high school next year.
As suicides among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teenagers have gotten more attention in the past year, researchers have sought to identify the factors that play the largest role. One study published in the journal Pediatrics in May, which looked at nearly 32,000 teenagers in 34 counties across Oregon, found that gay and bisexual teenagers were significantly more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. The risk of an attempt was 20 percent greater among gay teenagers who lacked supportive social surroundings, like schools with gay-straight alliance groups or school policies that specifically protected gay, lesbian and bisexual students.
An editorial accompanying the study said the findings pointed to the need for schools to adopt policies that create “more supportive and inclusive surroundings.”
“By encouraging more positive environments,” the report stated, “such policies could help reduce the risk of suicide attempts not only among LGB students, but also among heterosexual students.”
from The New York Times