Destiny Gleason died over the weekend, days after she was found hanging from an extension cord on a pull-up bar in her bedroom at her family’s Warrenton home, her mother, Stephanie Clark, told KTVI-TV.
Destiny left Black Hawk Middle School in handcuffs last Tuesday after she fought with other students at the school. She decided to take her own life after seeing what kids had posted on Facebook about the fight, Clark said.
“She just wanted everybody to like her, that’s all she wanted,” Clark told the TV station as she burst into tears. “Words matter. That old saying, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?' No, they will. They will. And we lost our daughter because of words.”
The teen enrolled at the school after her mom and her stepfather, Kurtis Clark, moved the family to the town roughly 60 miles west of St. Louis over the summer.
Her mom said her classmates, who did "anything they could possibly do to hurt her and bring her down," once pasted Destiny’s name across a photo of someone’s private parts and posted the pictures all over school.
“The words you call me are just words,” Destiny said in a self-filmed Facebook video from two weeks ago obtained by the TV station. “That’s not who I really am. That’s not what I’ll ever be.”
The Clarks told school officials about what was happening to Destiny, they said.
“We tried to be there for her as much as possible and do everything that we possibly could,” Kurtis Clark said. “It would have been nice if somebody else would have too, instead of just saying, ‘We are going to talk to them,’ or ‘We had a talk with them’ or ‘We told them not to talk to each other.’”
Officials at the Warren County R-III School District didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday night.
District Superintendent Dr. James Chandler, reached by the TV station, said privacy laws prevented him from discussing Destiny’s case in particular. He said the district takes bullying seriously and offers an anonymous hotline where students can report it.
Destiny’s family has planned a memorial service on Saturday at Broemmelsiek Park in nearby Defiance, according to a GoFundMe page for Destiny started by a family friend.
The teen succumbed to seizures and brain swelling early Saturday after it appeared she might survive, the page said. It had raised over $7,800 by Wednesday night.
“Pull together and help my friend pay for her daughter's funeral and all the medical expenses,” the page reads. “She was their world. If you ask me the worst fate of all is having to bury a child."
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