Parents Of Bullied 8-Year-Old Who Killed Himself Can Sue School

CINCINNATI, OH — The parents of an 8-year-old Ohio boy who killed himself in 2017 to escape persistent bullying can sue the Cincinnati school district, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday.

Cornelia Reynolds and Benyam Taye, the parents of Gabriel Taye, established “reckless behavior” on the part of Cincinnati Public Schools and school officials, allowing their wrongful death lawsuit to go to trial, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

Gabriel hanged himself at his home on Jan. 26, 2017. Two days earlier, the third grader had been punched, kicked and knocked unconscious when he was thrown against the boys bathroom wall by other students at his Cincinnati elementary school, according to a police detective’s report.

The boy stayed home the day after the assault — something thousands of U.S. school children did in pre-pandemic years to avoid their bullies — but returned the next day, only to be bullied again by students who took his water bottle and tried to flush it down the toilet, his parents say in the lawsuit.

READ MORE: The Menace Of Bullies: A Patch Series

In their lawsuit, the parents accuse school officials of intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress and failure to report child abuse. Gabriel had been bullied since first grade, according to the lawsuit, but the torment had escalated by the time he reached third grade.

But, they say, Cincinnati school officials either misrepresented the bullying attacks on their son or failed to inform them. They also charge that when Gabriel was knocked out, Carson Elementary School administrators didn’t call 911, didn’t punish the bullies involved, didn’t tell teachers of the bullying, didn’t supervise the bathroom despite that bullying that had previously occurred there, and withheld information.

“Ultimately,” Judge Bernice Bouie Donald wrote in the opinion moving the lawsuit forward, school officials’ lack of attention to the bullying “prevented [Gabriel’s] parents from fully understanding [Gabriel’s] horrifying experience at Carson Elementary until it was too late.”

Donald noted in her opinion that the school district’s own safety guidelines warn that suicide can result from bullying.

“As alleged, [the defendants’] behavior shows ‘conscious disregard of or indifference to a known or obvious risk of harm’ to [Gabriel] that was 'unreasonable under the circumstances' because they knew [he] was harassed and bullied at school and that a risk of bullying is suicide, and yet they utterly failed to take reasonable steps to protect [Gabriel] from that risk," Donald wrote.

It’s notoriously difficult for parents whose children who have been relentlessly bullied to sue schools and the people who run them. Establishing that district officials knew about the bullying isn’t enough. The U.S. Supreme Court set a “high bar” with its deliberate-indifference standard.

“It requires only that school officials respond to known peer harassment in a manner that is not ‘clearly unreasonable in light of the known circumstances,’” a three-judge panel of the same 6th Circuit court said in a 2016 opinion rejecting an appeal by Tennessee parents claiming relentless bullying of their son over a two-year period forced them to enroll him in a different school.

Such lawsuits are becoming more common with increasing awareness about the relationship between bullying and suicidal behaviors. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a 2014 report that “youth who report any involvement with bullying behavior are more likely to report high levels of suicide-related behavior than youth who do not report any involvement with bullying behavior.”

The agency stopped short of saying that bullying directly causes suicide, but said enough is known “about the relationship between bullying and suicide-related behavior to make evidence-based recommendations to improve prevention efforts.”

The CDC decided to investigate the relationship between bullying and suicide after a decade of headlines about kids who killed themselves to avoid vicious torment from their peers. Those headlines have become “regrettably common,” the CDC said in its report.

“There is so much pain and suffering associated with each of these events, affecting individuals, families, communities and our society as a whole and resulting in an increasing national outcry to ‘do something’ about the problem of bullying and suicide,” the report said.

Patch’s “Menace of Bullies” series was launched nearly four years ago to bring awareness to the issues of bullying and cyberbullying, which affects 1 in 3 U.S. schoolchildren and can saddle them with a lifetime of difficulties from poor grades and isolation in school to aggressive behavior and involvement in violence or crime, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and alcohol and drug dependence.

The Cincinnati school district’s attorney, Aaron Herzig, said in an email to The Associated Press that the court made “a preliminary decision based on the plaintiffs’ side of the story” and assumed that all the allegations Gabriel’s parents made are true.

“However, it does not reflect the facts as they have developed throughout this case,” Herzig wrote. He declined to say if the ruling, which upheld the decision of a lower court, would be appealed.

School officials have said in the past that Gabriel said he had fainted in the bathroom, and that he had never reported bullying or assaults, The Associated Press reported.

Jennifer Branch, an attorney for Gabriel’s mother, told The AP in an email that “the truth about what happened to Gabe at Carson elementary needs to be revealed and shared with all parents.”

“We have been able to gather testimony and evidence these last few months,” she wrote. “Now we can proceed to trial.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.