Survivor Of Suicide And Bullying Writes Frankly About Both

REISTERSTOWN, MD — Before he was out of high school, Maryland author Steve Smith had tried four times to kill himself to escape bullies, the first time when he was 11. Now, the Reisterstown man, 53, is using his autobiography to help steer bullied kids away from impulsive acts of desperation.

The kids Smith is trying to reach are real: Jamari Dent, 11, of Chicago, wrapped a bedsheet around his neck and hanged himself on a coat hanger to escape bullying by his classmates and teachers, his mother said. He’s recovering, but it’s too soon to know if he will suffer permanent neurological damage, according to his mother, who said she had reported the bullying for months to her son’s school. Kevin Reese Jr., a 10-year-old from Houston boy, killed himself in January after months of bullying. In February, Seven Bridges, 10, of Louisville, Kentucky, was the eighth student in his school district this year to kill himself.

There are many, many others. It happens so often that kids see suicide as their only escape from the relentless torment of bullying that there’s no way to keep an accurate count.

Steve Smith might have been any one of them.

Who Killed The Class Fish?

To understand where Smith is coming from in his talks about bullying, go back to when it began for him, to his first day of kindergarten at a now-defunct Catholic school in Johnson City, New York.

A shy boy, he gravitated toward a lone boy standing near the classroom goldfish bowl during playtime and introduced himself. The other kid didn’t say a word. “He just looked at me, turned the fishbowl toward me and poured the water on me,” Smith says, recalling the incident with vivid clarity. “Then he stomped on the fish and said to the teacher, ‘he killed the fish.’ ”

The then 5-year-old was suspended from school for two days. He denied killing the fish, and pointed to his wet school uniform as proof the other boy had been responsible. School officials didn’t believe him. His folks thought he was lying, too. His dad whipped him with a belt for killing the fish and being disrespectful to the teacher, and his mom took him back to school and told him to apologize.

When Smith dug in and refused, the teacher apologized for him.

“I became the most hated kid in school because everyone thought I killed the fish,” Smith recalls. “It went from one bully to two bullies to five bullies and more throughout the years.”

It didn’t happen every day. Sometimes, several days or a couple of weeks passed between bad beatings, Smith says, “but I got bumped into in the hallways and called names like ‘stupid’ almost hourly.” A kid with dyslexia, he struggled to make sense of the jumbled mess on the page when he was asked to read aloud, and his teachers told him to “stop being so stupid, stop being so dumb” and to “stop making up stories” when he protested he couldn’t read.

When he came home bloody with torn clothes, he got in more trouble for treating his school uniforms carelessly. Eventually, he stopped telling his parents what he was going through. They weren’t going to believe him anyway, he says.

No one else believed him, either. From the outside, his home life looked just fine. He was the son of devout Catholics — his father was an usher and in the Knights of Columbus — and “people who knew my parents thought of them as nice, polite, caring people.”

“But when we got home, Dad would kick me, throw me against walls and whip me,” Smith says. “My sister would accuse me of doing things I didn’t do. I became the scapegoat, not the other two kids.”

No single incident prompted his first suicide attempt when he was in fourth grade. Smith chased a handful of Tylenol with a bottle of high alcohol content Nyquil cough syrup.

“It built up and built up,” Smith says of the relentless bullying, “like when you shake up a bottle of champagne and the pressure builds and builds until it blows the cork.”

He tried to kill himself again in sixth grade. And again in middle school. And once more in high school. It’s a wonder he never succeeded, Smith says.

‘I Want To Live’

After the last attempt, he kept his head down and got through high school, graduating in 1983 without having skipped a year of school. In 1985, he signed on for whatever hard-nosed drill sergeants might dish out and joined the Army. Years of bullying had already made him feel “like the lowest scum,” he says, “and I wasn’t scared of anything drill sergeants might call me.”

Smith was two weeks into basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, when he stared death down again, this time through nothing of his own doing. He was the company leader — a position of respect he never enjoyed during his dreadful childhood — when he collapsed on a 15-mile, double-time hike at 2:30 in the morning. He was carrying the company flag, had a heavy backpack strapped across his back and his M-16 rifle across his chest.

He had double pneumonia, and a priest gave him last rites. He awoke to a profound epiphany: He was thrilled to be alive and wanted to live.

“I tried to kill myself four times,” Smith says. “I was clinically dead, but I survived, and that started me thinking about my Catholic upbringing, my faith in God and something bigger for me.”

Smith is no longer a practicing Catholic after he studied the scriptures of major world religions — Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and others — and fused them together in a way he finds spiritually meaningful. His wife, Kristen, chides him for being “omnireligious,” but Smith says they all helped him find the “something bigger” that he’s turned into a life mission: Helping kids understand that suicide isn’t an acceptable response to bullying.

Schools’ Dilemma In Talking About Suicide

With good reason, school administrators are sometimes squeamish about opening that particular Pandora’s box. It’s a real dilemma. On one hand, parents and teachers don’t want to ignore that a child in their midst has attempted or succeeded suicide, but they rightfully worry that openly talking about it will prompt copycat suicides or add even greater numbers to suicide clusters that could spring up in response.

Not all, or even most, bullied children attempt to kill themselves, but enough do that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it felt “enormous pressure” to develop suicide prevention programs for schools.

Even the CDC, though, couches its research. Bullying- and suicide-related behaviors are closely related and bullying is among other factors increasing the risk of youth suicides, the agency says, but “we don’t know if bullying directly causes suicide-related behaviors.”

Smith has had a few signings for his book, “Bullied Nearly To Death; Loving My Life,” and a handful of media appearances. He would like to speak to more schools in Maryland, which isn’t a lot different than the rest of the country, where the number of adolescents and teenagers dying by suicide is at record levels. Nearly one in six high school students had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months, according to a recent Maryland Youth Risk Behavior survey.

But rather than discuss those startling trends in the hushed tones of a mortuary, Smith talks boldly about the kids who see no way out of bullying short of death. Chances are pretty good on any given day, he says, that kids have already seen the word “suicide” at least once on their social media and news feeds by the time they get to lunch break.

“It’s amazing how smart these kids are, how educated they are,” Smith says. “They hear things, see headlines, and as soon as they see the word ‘suicide,’ they think maybe that’s the way to stop [the bullying]. Kids already know about it.”

Don’t “tempt the Grim Reaper,” Smith tells kids, reminding them of the finality of death, and its lingering effect on family and friends who inevitably blame themselves for not doing enough.

“Don’t stop talking about it, and keep looking for help. I gave up four times because I got fed up trying to find help,” his spiel goes. “I know there were organizations even back then that probably would have helped, and there are more now.

“Always look for help. Always.”

It’s this way, he tells kids: Violence escalates when it’s retaliated. A push becomes a punch, a punch starts a brawl, and a brawl could result in a stabbing or shooting.

“Respond to a bully with kindness and their power is destroyed,” he says. “Offer them a compliment and you have gained the upper hand.”

Smith has reconciled with all but one of his former bullies, including his dad and sister, and is good friends with some of them today. Typical conversations started something like this:

“I remember you, and I’m sure I remember me. Listen, all of that is in the past, and I forgive you for what you did to me. You beat the crap out of me, but I survived that, I survived trying to kill myself. I wrote a book and my book tells kids how to fight against bullying. I’m using what you did to help other kids.”

As part of a national reporting project, Patch has been looking at society's roles and responsibilities in bullying and a child's unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes we might offer solutions that save lives.

Do you have a story to tell? Are you concerned about how your local schools handle bullies and their victims?

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Selected Reporting

• Bullied To Death: When Kids Kill With Words
• America's Shameful Truth About School Shooters And Bullying
• Girl-To-Girl Bullying: Why It’s Different, Difficult To Confront
• Bully Upstander: Whatever He Said Caused Bullies To Back Down
• Bullying Caused 11-Year-Old To Attempt Suicide, Mother Says
• Bullied 10-Year-Old's Suicide 8th In School District This Year
• Girls More Likely Than Boys To See Bullying As Harmful: Study
• 13-Year-Old Hangs Herself, But Bullying Killed Her
• Teen Tells Bullies In Video: 'Every Day, I Wear Your Words'
• 'The Hero Myth': Why Expecting Kids To Fight Bullies Is Harmful
• 'Mr. Anti-Bully': Reformed Bully, 12, Sets Mistake Right
• Bullies And Their Targets The Same: Digital Self-Harm Rising

From No Bully, Patch News Partner

• Patch Partners With No Bully To Help Eradicate Bullying
• Cyberbullying Is Now A Crime In Michigan: Is Criminalizing A Good Idea?

From The Experts

• 'The Anti-Bully': Talk And, Especially, Listen To Your Kids
• The Bully Menace: Patch Experts Offer Tips To Parents
• Anti-Bully Experts Offer Tips On Sometimes Deadly Encounters
• Understanding The Bully: They're Often Victims, Too, Experts Say

What We've Learned

• The Bully Menace: What Patch Has Learned About Childhood Torture