Judging Phoebe Prince

The community of South Hadley is ‘still raw’ after the suicide last Janaury of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince, who had recently moved there from Co Clare. As six teenagers go on trial in connection with her death, opinion is divided on who was to blame

SOUTH HADLEY would like to forget Phoebe Prince, but it can’t. Nine months after the 15-year-old Irish girl walked the few hundred metres home from South Hadley High School and hanged herself in a closet, the child’s suicide still casts a pall over the town of 17,000.

The flowers, teddy bears and notes that piled up along the white picket fence are gone now. The only recognition, albeit indirect, of the bullying that precipitated Phoebe’s death is a two-metre by four-metre banner hanging over the entrance to the school, emblazoned with the word RESPECT.

Kevin Miele, the owner of the auto detailing shop next door to the house where Phoebe died, wells up with tears when he recalls “that horrible day”: the police cars and ambulances screeching to a halt in the car park in front of his shop; seeing Phoebe’s 12-year-old sister Lauren, distraught after finding her lifeless body, escorted out. “This town actually has feelings, and it’s hard for us to get over,” Miele says.

This week, Sean Mulveyhill and Kayla Narey, two of six teenagers accused of raping and/or bullying Phoebe, appeared in court for the first time. One member of the public in Superior Court 2 for the brief pre-trial hearing was Kathleen, an Irish-American from South Hadley.

As we waited for Mulveyhill and Narey’s brief appearance, Kathleen told me: “Yesterday, I voted [in the mid-term elections] in the school library, and I thought how Phoebe was tormented there on the last day of her life. I think of her every time I drive past the school and her house.”

Many of South Hadley’s residents have retreated into silence. The school principal, Dan Smith, refused my request for an interview. Though prosecuting the six teenagers will be a key duty of the new district attorney who was elected this week, the bullying and death of Phoebe Prince did not figure at all in the campaign.

When I stopped briefly to take photographs of the school, from a distance, in the absence of pupils, the principal’s secretary and a security guard with a walkie-talkie walked out to the car park to tell me to leave. “A student’s mother saw you and called us, very upset,” the secretary said with a quivering voice. “She said, ‘Why won’t they leave our children alone?’ It’s still very raw.”

Ed Boiselle, the chairman of the school committee, banned talk of Phoebe Prince in meetings “in order to protect her privacy”, Gus Sayer, the school superintendent, said. Luke Gelinas, the father of a high school senior who has been vocal in demanding the resignation of school administrators, nonetheless stood up at a meeting and began talking about Phoebe. He was interrupted and escorted out by policemen — a move that was criticised by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Opposing versions of Phoebe's story have taken root. A week after the Irish girl's death, Darby O'Brien, who heads an advertising agency in South Hadley, says he was moved by his 86-year-old-father Charles to call Kevin Cullen, a columnist for the Boston Globe. "He said, 'You should call your old friend Cullen'. His sense was they were going to sweep this under the rug," O'Brien recalls.

Ten days after Phoebe’s death, Cullen published a powerful column entitled “The Untouchable Mean Girls”, about how jealous girls at South Hadley High persecuted Phoebe. The column transformed Phoebe’s suicide into a national news story.

At the end of March, when the outgoing district attorney Elizabeth Scheibel indicted the six teenagers, the story took on global proportions. Little South Hadley had never known such ignominy.

School officials and defence lawyers then helped Emily Bazelon, a Yale Law School graduate and senior editor for the online magazine slate.com (owned by the Washington Post) to delve into Phoebe Prince’s background. “Bazelon did a very good job cosying up to the school, because they knew she was going to take on the DA,” says O’Brien. “She thought the charges were extreme.”

Bazelon did not respond to a request from The Irish Timesfor an interview. O'Brien believes she relied on material gathered by private detectives in Ireland.

Bazelon documents how before Phoebe moved with her mother and sister from Co Clare to South Hadley a year ago, she had a history of bullying and being bullied, and of self-mutilation and depression.

Defence lawyers, school officials and a private detective hired to investigate Phoebe’s past all praised Bazelon’s articles to me. They are well written and factual, but they leave the reader with the disturbing impression that Phoebe, not the bullies, is on trial.

Bazelon wrote that her investigation “reveals the uncomfortable fact that Phoebe helped set in motion the conflicts with other students that ended in them turning on her. Her death was tragic, and she shouldn’t have been bullied. But she was deeply troubled long before she ever met the six defendants. And her own behaviour made other students understandably upset.”

This counter offensive, intended to shift the narrative to portray one of a mentally ill trouble-maker who was in any case doomed to die is certain to shape the upcoming trials. Defence lawyers have requested all Phoebe’s school, medical and psychological records.

OTHER SOUTH HADLEYkids regarded treatment of Phoebe as "normal girl drama", Bazelon wrote last month: "Should we send teenagers to prison for being nasty to one another? Is it really fair to lay the burden of Phoebe's suicide on these kids?" School superintendent Gus Sayer also believes the charges are excessive. Regarding the charge of statutory rape against Mulveyhill and Austin Renaud, he says, "None of the other thousands of kids who did that last night are on trial. I'm not trying to excuse it, but it's unusual [to prosecute for statutory rape]."

In a statement responding to Bazelon’s articles, former district attorney Elizabeth Scheibel wrote Bazelon “suggests Phoebe’s internal struggles alone caused her death and it is unfair to hold these defendants accountable for their behaviour. As a matter of law, the existence of a victim’s disability does not legally excuse a defendant’s criminal actions. Under many statutory schemes it serves to aggravate the offence, rather than mitigate it.”

Defence lawyers and officials portray the six co-defendants and school administrators as hapless victims of media harassment. “There’s a national problem about bullying,” Sayer said. “The story was waiting to be written. It was too simple: Mean Girls – right from the movie (a 2004 film written by Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan). All they do is sit around and think about what they can do to other kids. School officials knew what was happening and turned their backs on it. That’s the storyline. It is so untrue.”

One of the ironies of Phoebe’s case is that she was labelled an “Irish whore” and an “Irish slut” by teenagers of Irish origin. Western Massachusetts was largely populated by refugees from the Famine, and the region remains one of the most heavily Irish areas of the country. This week, two men with Irish names competed for the office of district attorney – which is located above Tully O’Reilly’s pub in nearby Northampton.

No one believes Phoebe was bullied because of her Irishness, though the Ancient Order of Hibernians raised money for her family after reports of the ethnic slurs against her. "The Boston and Irish press have been particularly brutal (in their criticism of school officials)," says Sayer. "I have a reputation for being honest and trustworthy. Here comes the Boston Herald, and just trashes me. Why are they so worked up over this whole thing? They're probably Irish too. Every time anything appears in the Irish press, I get e-mails saying, 'How can you be so awful?'."

In coming months, the brief, sad life of Phoebe Prince will be picked over and dragged through the mud. Judge and jurors will ask whether Phoebe would have hanged herself had she not been bullied without mercy in the weeks leading up to January 14th.

On the night before her death, Phoebe had a telephone conversation with an older female friend about what she was going to wear to the cotillion, the school dance that was held two days after her death. “She had chosen a short, black lace dress. I saw it. It was pretty,” the woman said. “We had a long debate about whether she should wear red or pink shoes, whether she should wear [tights] or not. She loved fashion. She seemed cheerful.”

Less than 24 hours later, after being called obscene names all day at school, after having an empty drink can thrown at her as she walked home in tears, Phoebe sent a last text message to a close male friend in whom she confided: “I cant do it anymore . . . im literally hme cryn, my scar on my chest is potentially permanent, my bodies fukd up what mre do they want frm me? Du I hav to fukn od!”

Those were her last words. There is much that is true in Bazelon’s depiction of Phoebe as deeply disturbed, says the older woman friend. “She was a beautiful child who was in a lot of pain.”