Kenneth Suttner. (Howard County coroner)
High school wasn’t easy for 17-year-old Kenneth Suttner.
“A lot of people, kids, made fun of the way — basically everything about him,” his best friend Lexie Graves testified, according to the Columbia Daily Tribune. Suttner was overweight and spoke with a speech impediment: two prime targets for bullies at Glasgow High School in Glasgow, Mo.
As Mary Korte, the mother of one of Suttner’s friends, put it, “Kenny spent his life trying to tolerate negative words and actions.”
That life came to an abrupt end on Dec. 21, when Suttner committed suicide.
“These things were brought to the attention of the appropriate school officials, and it’s a shame it was swept under the rug,” Korte said.
Barbara Smith, the mother of another student, testified that she moved her son out of the school district because the bullying was so bad, so unchecked.
“Every time we went to the school to do something about the bullying, it just got worse,” Smith said.
Perhaps the worst alleged offender, though, was Suttner’s 21-year-old supervisor at the Dairy Queen where he worked. Harley Branham, a manager there, allegedly did everything she could to make the boy’s life miserable.
Allison Bennett, a former co-worker, testified that Branham constantly ridiculed him. She made him lie prostrate on his stomach while cleaning the fast food restaurant’s floor by hand. Once, she threw a cheeseburger at Suttner because he made it incorrectly, Bennett said. (Branham said this was all meant, and taken by Suttner, in jest.)
Eventually, Suttner had enough.
The sun had long set Dec. 21, but Suttner sat on a log outside his house anyway.
The cold didn’t matter much, not that night.
After placing a few calls to friends and family, he raised a .22 to his head and ended his life.
In an unusual legal twist on an all-too-common sad story, Branham was arrested after a prosecutor charged her with involuntary manslaughter.
