16 year old Cameron Warwick killed himself because he couldn’t cope with the horrific bullying he suffered from. Cameron, from Hampshire, England was autistic and had mental health problems, LGBTQNation reports.
The victim’s mother, Kerry Warwick, said that students would throw food at him during lunch and call him names. “The bullies would prey on the fact he was gay,” Kerry Warwick said at a judicial hearing. “He was ostracised, with pupils refusing to sit with him.” She said that some of it might have been “banter,” but that didn’t matter because “he didn’t understand it.”
“He had resigned himself to the bullying” by the time he was 14, she added. She said that her son turned to self-harm to cope, biting and hitting himself. She also said that he attempted suicide for the first time two years ago. Warwick liked to draw, and the investigation into the teen’s death found that suicide “was a theme with his drawings.”
“I believe Cameron was relentlessly bullied at school by other students for coming out as gay,” friend Christopher Robertson, 18, told investigators. Robertson knew Warwick from the internet. A school friend, 16-year-old Bill Ashcroft, said that he remembered Warwick being bullied at school. “One boy at school told him he was ugly,” adding that Warwick “didn’t keep his mental health a secret.”
Coroner Jason Pegg determined that Warwick’s death was a suicide. “Cameron had this background of autism – which resulted in bullying at times,” he said.
“Not only did he take his own life, he intended to do so.” “Cameron was a much-loved, gentle and kind young man,” his parents said in a statement.
“His illnesses made it impossible for him to continue to live in a world which he did not understand, and one which made little effort to understand him. We miss him with all of our hearts, and would urge others to be compassionate to other people’s vulnerabilities, or to share their own and seek help to avoid other such tragedies.”
