Should the Tormentors of Tyler Clementi be charged with MURDER or MANSLAUGHTER?

MENTOR, Ohio – Sladjana Vidovic's body lay in an open casket, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom. Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out her bedroom window.

The 16-year-old's last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults like "Slutty Jana" and threw food at her.

It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

Now two families -- including the Vidovics -- are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it. The lawsuits come after a national spate of high-profile suicides by gay teens and others, and during a time of national soul-searching about what can be done to stop it.

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket -- and laughed.

"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died."

Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming. She loved to dance. She would turn on the stereo and drag her father out of his chair, dance him in circles around the living room.

"Nonstop smile. Nonstop music," says her father, Dragan, who speaks only a little English.

At school, life was very different. She was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like "Slutty Jana" or "Slut-Jana-Vagina." A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.

Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she'd be dead in the morning, that they'd find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.

"Sladjana did stand up for herself, but toward the end she just kind of stopped," says her best friend, Jelena Jandric. "Because she couldn't handle it. She didn't have enough strength."

Vidovic's parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her.

She had already withdrawn from Mentor and enrolled in an online school about a week before she killed herself.

When the family tried to retrieve records about their reports of bullying, school officials told them the records were destroyed during a switch to computers. The family sued in August.

Two years after her death, Dragan Vidovic waves his hand over the family living room, where a vase of pink flowers stands next to a photograph of Sladjana.

"Today, no music," he says sadly. "No smile."

femme fatale wrote:They should be charged with whatever charges are associated with invasion of privacy and I can see a civil suit coming on top of criminal charges, but he chose to end his own life. They may have his blood on their hands theoretically, but theory shouldn't be enough to charge someone with murder. They didn't technically kill him and shouldn't be charged with his death any more than his own parents who clearly didn't raise him to enough self-pride to be able to withstand humiliation.

JM130ELM wrote:I find it annoying that Tyler Clementi is almost being treated like the Matthew Shepherd of his generation. I'm also tired of hearing this latest sensationalized term "bullied to death." No one can be bullied to death. Bullying doesn't attack your nervous system and shut down your organs.

Forgiveness_Man wrote:
Well in theory it can if the bullies get violent, which is often known to happen and had this been the case, then the story would be different. I am least of all one to minimize the dangers of bullying.

We just gotta keep things in perspective I think. Charge people with what they did. You're responsible for your own choices, not somebody else's.

JM130ELM wrote:

If the harassment turns into a violent assault that becomes fatal, then it's murder (or manslaughter.) But the term "Bullied to Death" is being used to describe kids who're taunted to the point of suicide. Which, IMO, is over-dramatizing. Especially in a case like this where Clementi wasn't even being technically bullied. He was humiliated and mocked. The media however is using him as a poster child for schoolyard bullying, which isn't even an accurate portrayal of the events leading up to his death.

Supernova wrote:The best any prosecutor could get would be manslaughter...and I don't think this is a hate crime, but if the prosecutor manages to have them charged with it, sabes que, that's fine with me too because these two jerkoffs definitely need to serve time in jail. They need a good long time to see what it's like having THEIR privacy violated, people watching them all the time, when they shower, when they're on the toilet, everything.

femme fatale wrote:They should be charged with whatever charges are associated with invasion of privacy and I can see a civil suit coming on top of criminal charges, but he chose to end his own life. They may have his blood on their hands theoretically, but theory shouldn't be enough to charge someone with murder. They didn't technically kill him and shouldn't be charged with his death any more than his own parents who clearly didn't raise him to enough self-pride to be able to withstand humiliation.