New Report Details Phoebe’s Angst

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Phoebe Prince made a previous suicide attempt

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Phoebe began cutting herself again and on January 14, the day she took her life, she visited the school nurse with a visible cut on her upper chest.  The nurse called in a licensed social worker to speak with Phoebe.

Later that day at school Phoebe was on the receiving end of more verbal abuse from some of the students, and on her way home from school she was flowed by Ashley Longe in her friend’s car. Longe yelled, “whore” out the window and threw an empty drink can at her.

Before she hung herself from her stairwell with a black scarf that her sister had given her, Phoebe texted another male friend saying, “I can’t do it anymore. I’m literally home crying, my scar on my chest is potentially permanent, my bodies (sic) f***ed up what more do you want from me? Do I have to f***ing OD?”

Police found several drawings in Phoebe’s room after her death. One of them depicted a human figure with a noose around the neck. In a note pinned to the body in the drawing, Phoebe asked for forgiveness. Throughout her article Bazelon stated that at certain points the school administrators and counselors were made aware of Phoebe’s emotional issues and suicide attempt.

Darby O’Brien, a friend of the Prince family, told the Irish Voice that Phoebe’s mother had on many occasions went to the school authorities to make them aware of her daughter’s issues, as had Ann’s sister, Eileen Moore.

O’Brien said what’s clear from Bazelon’s article is that the school authorities should be held responsible for their lack of actions.
“It’s clear if you go back to the beginning of January that the school officials were aware of Phoebe’s issues and they consistently denied knowing anything up until the time of her death,” said O’Brien.

“The school talked about putting together a group that would monitor how Phoebe was doing but I don’t think that team ever met once.” 
What angers O’Brien more is the lies he and other parents were told from the school authorities.

 “I sat in a meting with the chairman of the school committee at the time, Ed Boizelle, and Gus Sayer, and they said to me, ‘If only the Prince family had told us something was wrong we might have been able to do something about it.’

“They knew from the very beginning and did nothing about it,” said O’Brien angrily. 

Phoebe’s aunt, Eileen Moore, who spoke to the Boston Herald last week, said Bazelon’s article “resurfaced everything for the family.”

Said Moore, “When an adolescent makes a first suicide attempt, it knocks a family blindside. They need to know there’s somewhere to turn, so that hopefully after that first cry for help, there will never be a second attempt.”

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