Ryan Patrick Halligan

Ryan Patrick Halligan (December 18 1989 - October 6 2003) was an Essex Junction, Vermont teenager who died by suicide at the age of 13 after excessive bullying from his classmates in real life and Cyber-bullying online. His death led his father, John P. Halligan, to lobby for laws to be passed in Vermont to improve how schools address bullying and suicide prevention.

Biography

Ryan was born on December 18 1989 in Poughkeepsie, New York. As shown in photographs on his memorial website, he was a middle child.

In his 1999-2000 school year, he suffered bullying at the hand of a group of students at his school because of his learning disorder. The family stated in a short documentary that Ryan enrolled in counseling, with little success. In December 2002, he told his father that the bullying had started again and asked for a Taebo Kick Boxing set for Christmas in order to learn how to defend himself against the bullies. Following a fight in February 2003 which was broken up by the assistant principal, the bully stopped bothering Ryan. Towards the end of 7th grade, Ryan told his father that he and the bully had become friends. However, after Ryan told him something personal, the bully used the information to spread a rumour that Ryan was gay.

AIM usage

According to his father and news reports, Ryan spent much of his time online during the summer of 2003, particularly on AIM and other instant messaging services. During the summer, he was cyber-bullied by schoolmates who taunted him, thinking he was gay. He unintentionally archived these conversations on his hard drive when he installed "dead aim", a freeware program. His dad also found in this folder of archived conversations transcripts of online exchanges in which a girl whom Ryan had a crush on pretended to like him but later told him at school that he was a "loser". He found out she only pretended to like him in order to retrieve personal information about him. Their private exchanges were copied and pasted into other IMs among his schoolmates to embarrass and humiliate him.

Suicide

John Halligan took away Ryan's computer shortly before he killed himself. John was out of town when Ryan died. On October 6th, 2003, Ryan waited until his entire family was asleep. When he discovered that they were all sleeping, Ryan, as his father stated, "went into the bathroom to silently hang himself" In the week after the funeral his father discovered the IM exchanges. They showed IMs of Ryan stating rude things about his classmates, and the night before he committed suicide, Ryan was in a chat room stating that he was going to kill himself, and that the other person would see reports in the newspaper about it the next day. "It was the hardest reading that I had ever done in my life", his father stated on the documentary.

External links

* [http://www.ryanpatrickhalligan.com Memorial Site]
* [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17265901/ MSNBC Report]
* [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/ Included in PBS Frontline report, "Growing Up Online"]