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For years now, BOSSIP has been telling you that “people ain’t s**t” and if you somehow still need a reminder of this unassailable fact, here you go.
On March 17, 2023, then-12-year-old Kelaia Turner was found hanging from a belt in her bedroom by her mother after enduring months of bullying at her Greenville, South Carolina school according to PEOPLE. As a result, she spent 101 days in the hospital and 31 of those were spent in ICU fighting for her life.
“She was gone for eight whole minutes,” Ty told the station. “Paramedics couldn’t find a pulse, and they couldn’t find her heartbeat. There were grown men in the room crying.”
PEOPLE obtained the paperwork to a lawsuit that has been filed by Kelaia’s family that names Greenville County Schools, the child’s teacher Olivia Bennett, and other administrators as negligent parties who failed to properly and promptly respond to the bullying that Kelaia faced.
“On Friday, December 17, 2021, fellow students were calling her a man and roach in Olivia Bennett’s class,” according to the complaint. “Ms. Bennett was complicit in the bullying and said nothing to the other students to stop it. One student asked, ‘Where’s the roach?’ and Ms. Bennett pointed to [Kelaia].”
To make this heartbreaking story even worse, one of Kelaia’s classmates brought further injury to her when they went to the hospital, took photos of her in the ICU, and spread them around the school’s rumor mill. Kelaia’s parents say that they “continually complained” about the bullying and feel that the school ignored their pleas.
A Greenville County Schools spokesperson named Tim Waller released a statement to PEOPLE:
“The school and district administrations investigated and addressed each of the reported incidents in accordance with policy and law,” Waller says. “No parent concerns or reports of bullying were ignored, and all were directly addressed with the student’s mother. We firmly deny the allegations made in the lawsuit that bullying and parent concerns at Fisher Middle School were not addressed.”
We hope that Kelaia makes a full recovery and lives a long and fulfilling life. We hope this family gets every red cent that they can extract out of all parties involved.
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