Sad news today, as MASSLive.com reports that a sixth grader from Springfield, Massachusetts has committed suicide in a direct response to being bullied in school. Part of the bullying was every day being called gay. MASSLive writers Mike Plaisance and Patrick Johnson filed the story.

Two days after the worst day of her life, when she found her 11-year-old son had committed suicide by hanging himself, Sirdeaner L. Walker said on Wednesday she wants the bullying to stop.

She found Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover hanging by an extension cord on the second floor of their 124 Northampton Ave. home Monday night after he had endured another day of taunting at New Leadership Charter School, where he was a sixth-grader, she said.

“I just want to help some other child. I know there are other kids being picked on, and it’s day in and day out,” said Walker, 43.

She spoke in her living room surrounded by family and friends. They had just returned from a church service. Photos of a beaming Carl – he played football, basketball and was a Boy Scout – peered from the top of the television.

Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover
April 17, 1997 - April 6, 2009

Walker went upstairs to check on him Monday night. “It was the worst experience of my life, and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Four years, it was four years ago I had breast cancer,” Walker said.

She phoned the school repeatedly since Carl began attending in September but the bullying continued, she said. Other students made him a target, daily calling him gay, making fun of how he dressed and threatening him, she said.

Carl had attended Alfred M. Glickman Elementary School up to fifth grade, but few of his friends accompanied him to New Leadership Charter School, she said.

On Monday, she said Carl told her that he accidentally hit a TV at the school with his backpack and the TV bumped into a girl, who shouted at him and threatened him with harm. He called his mother after school and said he had gotten a five-day suspension, she said.

School officials denied the incident had prompted a five-day suspension, said Walker, who nonetheless remains upset at what she said was the school’s pattern unresponsiveness.

“I called there every week,” she said. School officials told her they had decided that the mediation of Carl’s dispute with the female student was to consist of the two students eating lunch together all week, she said.

It belies the school’s failure to address suffering wrought by bullying, she said.

“If anything can come of this, it’s that another child doesn’t have to suffer like this and there can be some justice for some other child. I don’t want any other parent to go through this,” she said.

Let’s be crystal clear: We don’t know if Carl was gay, and the question is entirely beside the point. Being called gay wasn’t the only aspect of the violence toward him, but it seems to have been central.

“You’re gay” is one of the most powerful tools in the bully toolbox, whether you’re eleven or 59. This attitude doesn’t come from nowhere; it’s certainly helped along by the daily barrage of hate-filled messages from groups like Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, American Family Association, the National Organization for Marriage, and Exodus International.

These groups, and many others like them, send the targeted dehumanizing message that gays are lesser beings to be treated with contempt. The effects, as we see here with poor Carl, are quite real and terribly deadly, and can be completely unconnected with the victim’s actual romantic preference.

My heartfelt sympathy to the Walker-Hoover family. I can’t even imagine the horror they’re going through.

Funeral information can be found at this link. A collection is being taken to assist the family with burial expenses. Send donations to the following address.

Ms. Sirdeaner Walker
124 Northampton Avenue
Springfield, MA 01109

If you have kids, do me a favor and give them an extra squeeze today. If you work in a school, do your job and stop the violence toward all kids, gay or straight. Don’t turn your back on them–they’re counting on you.