Student’s death resurfaces painful memories of longtime bullying at Ocean Springs schools
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The death of Aubreigh Wyatt
The death by suicide of 13-year-old Aubreigh Wyatt has focused national attention on South Mississippi, with widespread calls for justice and anti-bullying enforcement.
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It’s been 10 years, but the pain wells up and the tears stream down Vanessa Owens’ cheeks as she remembers the mean, hateful things that children she thought were her friends did and said to her at Ocean Springs Middle School.
The pain is fresh this week because another child from the school is gone.
Aubreigh Paige Wyatt, #forever13, says the hashtag printed on T-shirts and repeated in social media posts, died last week. She was beautiful, she was kind and she was bullied.
“My baby, my beautiful, beautiful baby,” her mother, Heather Wyatt, said through tears during Aubreigh’s funeral Sunday. St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Ocean Springs was packed with her young friends and their parents.
Wyatt promised she would fight to make sure another child did not have to go through what Aubreigh endured. “We are going to make waves,” she said. “We are going to move mountains.”
Vanessa did not know Aubreigh. But she understands the pain of being bullied. She remembers how worthless she felt under the steady drumbeat of hateful taunts, how she just wanted it all to end. She is grateful that she lived to see that painful time in her life was fleeting.
Ocean Springs observes suicide awareness
The week was an emotional one for Ocean Springs. After Aubreigh’s death, students wore suicide awareness ribbons and colors to Greyhound football games. Players affixed stickers to the backs of their helmets in this month of September, which is, coincidentally, suicide awareness month.
Vanessa showed up at Ocean Springs Middle School for a protest over bullying. She and a handful of people, including her mother and grandmother, stood near a middle school sign where a makeshift memorial to Aubreigh had been fashioned.
Vanessa held a sign that said, “Be a beauty, not a bully.”
Being at the school, realizing what had happened to Aubreigh, brought back all the bad memories.
Vanessa wanted, at last, to tell her story. She wants people to know how badly bullying hurts. She doesn’t want to see another child bullied to death, a fate she almost experienced when her closest friends turned on her.
“It doesn’t last forever,” said Vanessa, who at 27 is a young mother with a home and career she loves. “Your life is so much more than middle school years ... Don’t listen to the bullies. What they are saying are only reflections of what’s going on with them in their own home. It’s nothing that you’re doing. Feel bad for them.”
How the bullying began
For Vanessa, the bullying started when she entered seventh grade at Ocean Springs Middle School. She acquired a nickname, “Big V.” Kids were calling her that, she told her mom, because she was fat.
Her mom protested — Vanessa might not have been model-thin, but she was within a normal weight range. The nickname stung and made Vanessa feel unattractive, and less than.
Vanessa was on the dance team. She hung out with the dancers, the cheerleaders, the football players — the cool kids. She was kind. She tried to include everyone. Her parents even enclosed the garage so she could have a crowd of girls for sleepovers.
Her parents thought her school years would be different from her older brother’s. He was brutally bullied through middle school into high school. When he was in 10th grade, his parents finally paid out-of-district tuition for him to attend Biloxi High School, where he was accepted and flourished, even singing with the school choir at Carnegie Hall in New York.
But Vanessa struggled, too. The “Big V” nickname stuck, even as she spent extra time at the gym to perfect her skills and keep her weight down.
Giving up on school in Ocean Springs
Vanessa was selected as a cheerleader her freshman year at Ocean Springs High. She was so proud to be on the cheer team and enjoyed the camaraderie with other girls who had become her closest friends. But it didn’t last long.
The cheer team of 14 was culled to 12 for competitions. It didn’t seem a coincidence to Vanessa and her mother, Karla Owens, that Vanessa and another of the heavier dancers didn’t make the competition squad.
Tryouts for cheerleaders came around again in March. Vanessa thought she had made the team. But she wasn’t selected. Almost immediately, her cheerleader friends shunned her. They stopped inviting her to sleepovers. They stopped calling or talking to her at school.
“Being excluded,” her mother said, “is the biggest part of being bullied.”
But there was plenty more to come. Her former friends gave her the cold shoulder. It got so bad, that she lingered in the room of one of her teachers, whom she thought was sympathetic, to avoid the hallways and cafeteria. One day, the teacher insisted Vanessa go to lunch, so she did.
She sat at her usual table, the one where her former friends were sitting. They looked at her. They looked at one another. And then they turned their backs. One of the girls said, “Is she really sitting here?”
Vanessa asked if she could leave. The teacher said yes. Vanessa put away her tray and ran from the cafeteria. She later learned that the teacher, who seemed like a friend, had been talking to the other girls about her.
Tenth grade was no better. She started the year at Ocean Springs High, but her friends continued to freeze her out and call her names. Reporting the bullying to school officials — teachers, the principal, the superintendent — didn’t help, which was also the case with her brother’s situation years earlier.
From Karla Owens’ perspective, the officials did nothing to protect her children.
Vanessa was in counseling. The psychologist she saw did not expect anything to improve and recommended she change schools. Vanessa’s parents transferred her to D’Iberville High School after the school year had started. She loved the school and found the support and friendship she had been missing since elementary school.
But the trauma hadn’t ended for Vanessa. During Christmas break, her former girlfriends from Ocean Springs vandalized her prized convertible. They slashed the top and wrote hateful words on it: “You suck,” “You’re a whore,” those kinds of things. Even now, the memory brings Vanessa to tears.
The family reported the vandalism to law enforcement, but Vanessa decided in the end not to press charges. She did not want any of the girls to have criminal records at such young ages. Their parents paid to repair Vanessa’s car.
Vanessa began to believe their words. They rang in her head constantly. She thought she was worthless. She decided to end it. She rammed her car into a wall and got an air bag to the face, fortunately surviving with only minor injuries. She told her parents the wreck had been an accident, waiting for years to tell them what really happened.
Police department investigates Aubreigh’s death
Vanessa has been moving past what happened to her. Only a year ago, she felt comfortable enough to visit downtown Ocean Springs. She has always worried that she would run into those girls, now women like her, who were so mean, her mom said.
But the latest tragedy involving Aubreigh has brought it all back up. She wanted to tell her story in hopes it might help others and in hopes the school district might stop the bullies.
Superintendent Michael Lindsey said the district does take bullying seriously. There are more protections for students today and multiple ways to report bullying, including anonymously on the school district’s website. The district can’t tell students and parents about any disciplinary action taken against another student, including one who is reported for bullying.
School district policies include punishments from in-school suspension to expulsion. Reports are available to campus police and can be escalated to involve local law enforcement. Criminal charges are an option in some cases. The district’s policy says bullying, hazing and stalking are treated “as serious offenses subject to criminal prosecution.”
The Ocean Springs Police Department is investigating Aubreigh Wyatt’s death. All unnatural deaths are investigated, Police Capt. Ryan LeMaire said. He said the investigation will take time and has started with the subpoena and examination of her phone. Simply unlocking social media accounts, he said, can take weeks. Any evidence found on her phone could lead to more subpoenas, more interviews.
Friends of the Owens family saw Vanessa, her mom and her grandmother outside the middle school for the bullying protest.
One of them texted Karla Owens. “So proud of Vanessa for standing up,” the text said. “What has happened is extremely sad and heartbreaking. Please let Vanessa know that it (is) never too late to stand up to bullies and I hope she keeps her voice loud because that helps and inspires those who are going through it.”
“I admire how brave she is.”
This story was originally published September 12, 2023 at 10:29 AM.
