In April 2022, Jack Reid, 17, committed suicide in his dorm room at the Lawrenceville School outside of Trenton, NJ.
On Sunday, the school admitted it didn’t do enough to protect Reid from bullying after a rumor started he was a rapist:
‘As we seek to improve as a community, we have examined our role and take responsibility for what we could have done differently. Lawrenceville’s top priority is the physical, social, and emotional health, safety, and wellbeing of our students. We recognize that in Jack’s case, we fell tragically short of these expectations,’ the statement read.’Jack was universally regarded as an extremely kind and good-hearted young man, with an unwavering sense of social and civic responsibility and a bright future. We continue to mourn this loss,’ the school wrote in the statement noting how a settlement had been reached with his parents, William and Elizabeth Reid.
It all started in the spring of 2021:
But in the spring of 2021, a persistent and untrue rumor that Jack was a rapist spread widely throughout the student body and led to cruel comments from some students, according to his parents.In September 2021, when he returned to school as a junior, he was nonetheless elected president of Dickinson House, one of the residential houses where the school’s boarding students live. That appears to have increased animosity among some of his classmates and caused the rumor to spread further, his parents said.A few days after the election, the unfounded rape accusation was posted anonymously to a nationwide, student-run app popular with boarding-school students, Jack’s parents said.The bullying spread quickly online, his parents said, and at Christmastime, during a secret Santa gift exchange among Lawrenceville classmates, Jack received a rape whistle and a book about how to make friends.
Jack and his parents confronted school officials about the bullying. The school investigated the allegations, which “found that the claim was bogus.” The school disciplined the student for bullying Jack, who was “expelled for an unrelated violation of school rules.”
The school never told anyone the results of the investigation. That was a huge mistake along with not supervising the boy the school expelled:
“There were steps that the school should in hindsight have taken but did not, including the fact that the school did not make a public or private statement that it investigated and found rumors about Jack that were untrue,” Lawrenceville said in the statement.The school and the Reids also tried unsuccessfully to get comments related to the sexual assault claims removed from the app.The school also acknowledged that it had erred more specifically on the night Jack took his life, just hours after the classmate involved in the bullying was formally expelled. Instead of being supervised as he packed his belongings, the boy was permitted to participate in a drawn-out farewell that included a final run around campus and a group photograph. During the gathering, some students also made harsh comments about Jack, inaccurately blaming him for the boy’s expulsion.“School administrators did not notify or check on Jack,” the school’s statement acknowledged. “That night, Jack took his life, telling a friend that he could not go through this again.”
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