This heart breaking story comes from the Chicago Tribune
The family of a 10-year-old Illinois girl found hanging in her closet believes teasing and bullying by classmates drove the little girl to kill herself.
Vermilion County Coroner Peggy Johnson said Tuesday that the final results of the autopsy on Ashlynn Conner won't be ready for some time but it appears she took her own life Friday night.
Ashlynn's family said she had been teased by children at Ridge Farm Elementary School and in her neighborhood in the small town for several years. Ridge Farm is about 45 miles southeast of Champaign.
"When she started cheering for youth football, we'd gotten her hair cut in a bob," Ashlynn's grandmother, Lory Hackney said. "The kids started making fun of her then. They started calling her a boy.''
Since then, she'd often been called fat or ugly, her family said.
County Sheriff Pat Hartshorn said investigators are considering bullying as a possibility. "We are not ruling out bullying, but we don't have any firm evidence to support bullying," he said.
Suicide among young children is uncommon but does happen hundreds of times a year.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 200 children between the ages of 10 and 14 killed themselves each year between 1999 and 2005, the most recent year for which data is available.
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In the US, a suicide occurs every 15 minutes...every 40 seconds world wide.
It's time we start talking to our kids about suicide.
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