New Report Details Phoebe’s Angst

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Phoebe Prince made a previous suicide attempt

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An extensive report published online last week reveals that 15-year-old Irish girl Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide in January in South Hadley, Massachusetts, had emotional problems dating back two years to her schooling days in Ireland.

The article published on Slate.com by journalist and lawyer Emily Bazelon revels, through her review of law enforcement records and extensive interviews with school staff and students, that Phoebe, who lived in Co. Clare with her family before moving to South Hadley in 2009, had attempted suicide in the past.

Bazelon outlined Phoebe’s emotional issues leading up to her suicide and stated that the Irish girl “set in motion” the bullying that occurred before her death.

“Based on extensive interviews and review of the law enforcement records, (my investigation) reveals the uncomfortable fact that Phoebe helped set in motion the conflicts with other students that ended in them turning on her,” Bazelon wrote.

The author described Phoebe’s relationship with two of the students, Sean Mulveyhill and Austin Renaud, both seniors at South Hadley High, as the reason some of the students turned on her.  Bazelon alleged in her article that Phoebe was intimate with other students’ boyfriends and this angered them.

Bazelon wrote that Phoebe began cutting herself while at a private boarding school in Ireland in 2008. She was having trouble with some of the students so her parents pulled her out of the school and enrolled her locally at the secondary school where Phoebe’s mother, Ann O’Brien Prince, taught in Co. Clare.

After another run-in with a girl at that school, Phoebe was back cutting herself and taking Prozac by February 2009.

That September Ann (her husband Jeremy stayed behind to tie up loose ends) moved the family to South Hadley, where she has family, to give Phoebe a new start.

Bazelon outlined the relationships Phoebe had with some of the male students and how this caused upset to some of the female students, leading them to call her names in school.

In November 2009 Phoebe renewed her prescription for Prozac and attended the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts for evaluation.

After Mulveyhill ended their relationship Phoebe told her mother she’d overdosed and she was hospitalized for a week.

Back at school in December, Bazelon wrote that Phoebe got involved with Renaud, who had a long-term girlfriend, Flannery Mullins. This led to some of Mullins’ friends ganging up on Phoebe and in January things got nastier.  

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