4 bullied teens at Mentor school die by own hand

Associated Press

MENTOR, Ohio

Sladjana Vidovic’s body lay in an open coffin, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom.

Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out of her bedroom window.

Suzana Vidovic found her sister’s body hanging over the front lawn.

The 16-year-old’s last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults such as“Slutty Jana” and threw food at her.

It was the fourth time in a little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.

Now two families — including the Vidovics — are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death, and the school did nothing to stop it.

If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the “100 Best Places to Live” by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana’s family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.

The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the coffin — and laughed.

Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to Northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming.

At school, she was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like “Slutty Jana” or “Slut-Jana-Vagina.” A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.

Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she’d be dead in the morning, that they’d find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.

Vidovic’s parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her.

She had already withdrawn from Mentor and enrolled in an online school about a week before she killed herself.

When the family tried to retrieve records about their reports of bullying, school officials told them the records were destroyed during a switch to computers. The family sued in August.

Eric Mohat was flamboyant and loud and preferred to wear pink most of the time. When he didn’t get the lead soprano part in the choir his freshman year, he was indignant, his mother says.

He wore a stuffed animal strapped to his arm, a lemur named Georges that was given its own seat in class.

“It was a gag,” says Mohat’s father, Bill. “And all the girls would come up to pet his monkey. And in his Spanish class, they would write stories about Georges.”

Mohat’s family and friends say he wasn’t gay, but people thought he was.

“They called him fag, homo, queer,” says his mother, Jan. “He told us that.”

Eric Mohat shot himself March 29, 2007, two weeks before a choir trip to Hawaii.

His parents asked the coroner to call it “bullicide.” At Eric’s funeral and after his death, other kids told the Mohats that they had seen the teen relentlessly bullied in math class.

Two years later, in April 2009, the Mohats sued the school district, the principal, the superintendent and Eric’s math teacher. The federal lawsuit is on hold while the Ohio Supreme Court considers a question of state law regarding the case.

Meredith Rezak, 16, shot herself in the head three weeks after the death of Mohat, a good friend of hers. Her cell phone, found next to her body, contained a photograph of Mohat with the caption “R.I.P. Eric a.k.a. Twiggy.”

Rezak was bright, outgoing and a well-liked player on the volleyball team. Shortly before her suicide, she had joined the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and told friends and family she thought she might be gay.

“Meredith ended up coming out that she was a lesbian,” he says. “I think much of that sparked a lot of the bullying from a lot of the other girls in school, ’cause she didn’t fit in.”

A year after Rezak’s death, the older of her two brothers, 22-year-old Justin, also shot and killed himself. His death certificate mentioned “chronic depressive reaction.”

This past March, her only other sibling, Matthew, died of a drug overdose at age 21.

Most mornings before school, Jennifer Eyring would take Pepto-Bismol to calm her stomach and plead with her mother to let her stay home.

Eyring, 16, was an accomplished equestrian who had a learning disability. She was developmentally delayed and had a hearing problem, so she received tutoring during the school day. For that, her mother says, she was bullied constantly.

By the end of her sophomore year in 2006, Eyring’s mother had decided to pull her out of Mentor High School and enroll her in an online school.

But one night that summer, Jennifer walked into her parents’ bedroom and told them she had taken some of her mother’s antidepressant pills to make herself feel better. Hours later, she died of an overdose.

The Eyrings do not hold Mentor High accountable, but they believe she would be alive today had she not been bullied.

Her parents are speaking out in hopes of preventing more tragedies.