Via: AOLNews.com
(March 29) –Two days before a high school dance, 15-year-old Phoebe Prince hanged herself at her parents’ home. Now, investigators have accused nine of her fellow students with the bullying that may have prompted the suicide.
At a news conference today, Northwestern Massachusetts District Attorney Elizabeth Scheibel detailed the charges against Prince’s fellow students at South Hadley High School. They included statutory rape, violation of civil rights, criminal harassment and disturbance of a school assembly, The Boston Globe reported.
Prince, who recently immigrated to the United States from Ireland with her family, was the target of abuse and bullying since last fall, Scheibel said, sometimes within the view of school staff, as is said to have been the case on the day she took her own life.
“The harassment reported to have occurred that day in the school library appears to have been conducted in the presence of a faculty member and several students, but went unreported to school administrators until after Phoebe’s death,” Scheibel said.
In the wake of Prince’s suicide on Jan. 14, residents of South Hadley have demanded that school Superintendent Gus Sayer resign from office, the Boston Herald reported. Until Monday’s indictments were handed down, no action had been taken against the students accused of bullying Prince.
