Felicia Garcia, bullied Staten Island teen, commits suicide as football players tease her on train platform
The mayor of Otsu, Japan said on July 6, 2012 that an investigation would be launched into the bullying that might have led to a 13-year-old boy committing suicide in October of last year.
If you're a teen guy who has sex, you're a "stud," but if you're a teen girl having sex, then you're labeled a "slut," or so the cliche goes. Now, it appears that this type of "slut-shaming" may have driven a young girl to suicide. Felicia Garcia, a 15-year-old from Staten Island who killed herself on Wednesday, was relentlessly bullied about her sexual history before she died, the New York Daily News reported. “Kids are saying she had sex with some guys from the football team at a party after the game,” a friend of Felicia told the Daily News. “Later on they wouldn't leave her alone about it. They just kept bullying her and bullying her.”
“This poor girl was called a slut. She was teased on Facebook," another student told the New York Post. And a senior said that Felicia was bullied because "she looked different and had piercings."
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In fact, the football players continued to bully her up until her death, police say. They were on the platform with her the afternoon she died, taunting her with "sexually explicit jeers" when she suddenly jumped, according to the Post. “They were torturing her,” another student told the Post. “How can you go through life being verbally assaulted like that? These guys are cruel and malicious.”
Memorial photos of Felicia were fastened to the gate outside the train station on Wednesday, the Staten Island Advance Reported. The photos sat next to a photograph of Billy Gottlieb, who also jumped in front of a train at the same station and died in 2007.