This father of Indiana’s Sammy Teusch said it’s “disgusting” and “devastating” that there’s still no accountability from the educators who did not do their part in coming in to help the tormented young boy.
When he was leaving his brother’s soccer game on May 4, 2024, ten –year-old Sammy Teusch looked at a boy on the field, and, in a hushed voice, told his parents, “That’s him,” remembered his father Samuel, with a heavy heart.
The boy noticed by Sammy was one of a number of classmates who bullied him at school. This boy, one week before, had pushed him into a trash can and others were laughing.
At first, Sammy’s peers at Greenfield elementary were verbally bullying him about his appearance, his glasses and teeth, and overtime it evolved into physical violence – so Teusch told the Daily Mail.
The youngster was on the starter glasses until the new ones came – $525 specs that he hoped would stop the bullying.
‘Helpless’
The family has already blown its whistle, contacting the school district several times in desperate need of help. Yet the bullying continued.
Sammy begged his teachers to do something about it, but he was “ignored,” according to his dad.
After an incident several months earlier when Sammy was hit on the school bus “and got into trouble for it”, Teusch recalls that his son said “Daddy, it’s okay. [Educators] don’t care. They’re not listening to me.”
“He felt helpless… And the school said to us every time that they don’t accept bullying and they were going to do everything for its end, but it never ended.”
Talking to people, Teusch said the family was receiving nothing from school.
“I’d talk to the school. They are saying, ‘Sammy is a discipline problem’. And I’m like, ‘What? Aren’t they obvious – he’s hiding under a desk and hiding in a closet and hiding in the bathroom. What is he hiding from?’ said the heartbroken dad.
Sammy’s last morning
On a Sunday morning after the soccer game, Teusch found his youngest son cuddling in bed with his mother.
‘I want pancakes, Daddy,’ Sammy told his father after being asked what he would like for a break.
Happy to please, the doting dad went to the store with one of Sammy’s brothers, Xander.
Things took a turn when this pair got home and called Sammy down for pancakes, Xander, 13, found the fourth-grader hanging in his bedroom, heartbreaking the parents and three siblings.
The Teusch family thinks that two years of bullying, which included cruel taunts to kill himself, caused this devastating loss.
“He wasn’t depressed… he was a happy little boy,” his mother told the Daily Mail, saying there were no signs of suicide. “He was so much alive and loving and caring…He was scared to death in a second and this seemed to be his only way out. It still seems like he’s still around.
Childhood suicide
According to the Centers for Disease Control(CDC), in the United States, one in five 5 students, between the ages of 12 to 18 face bullying in school every year.
And though, suicide for children under the age of 10 is still rather rare, experts warn that suicide “is responsible for more deaths among youths ages 10 to 24 years than any single major medical illness.”
“Everybody loved Sammy. He had 100 friends, but he had six to eight kids who tortured him to his grave, and I will never let it happen to other families,” said Teusch who is dedicated to suicide awareness in kids.
“I want to be the last parent crying on television,” Teusch told ABC, and of his beloved son, “We all cherished Sammy,” he said. In many ways, he was our leader.”
No accountability
Where the Teusch family is still under the unbearable weight of losing their beloved Sammy, there is the quiet but strong anger, a fierce need for justice.
Teusch reports that the students who unceasingly bullied his son in school had to face no apparent repercussions.
What makes matters worse is that the tragic incident has also been largely overlooked by school officials of Greenfield-Central Community School Corporation, which is mentioned in a wrongful death lawsuit that the family filed.
The complaint provides the unfortunate circumstance of Sammy’s last months and mentions several school officials, both of whom currently occupy their seats, Principal Branson Curtis and Superintendent Dr. Harold Olin.
“It’s disgusting, it’s shocking, and it’s devastating,” Teusch said. “There has been no accountability. This takes place on a Sunday and on the next day, the following Monday, [the bullies] go back into school as though nothing has happened and nothing is done, and nothing is said.
What is the message that’s being sent?… The bullies will then move on to attack other kids as well they believe that it is okay…they will think ‘I killed one and I got away with it’.
He himself adds, “And if this can happen to Sammy, this can happen to any child on Earth”.
‘The world through Sammy’s eyes’
Speaking of Sammy’s funky new glasses, sadly received by him two days after he took his life, Teusch adds, “Whenever I miss him, I can pick those glasses up and still see the world through Sammy’s eyes…We all miss him terribly… but in his name we’re going to change the world”.
Although the Teusch family’s hope is not for revenge, it is in a way for accountability, awareness, and a change – a place where no other child, and no other family, will ever have to suffer through such unthinkable pain.
