Amanda Todd, born in Vancouver, committed suicide on the night of October 10^th in Coquitlam, Canada.  After years of being bullied the hurt became too much for her to handle, and it pushed her to kill herself.

In 7^th grade, Todd was video chatting a boy who flattered her into flashing the camera, which ended up being one of her biggest mistakes.  One year later, a stranger contacted her on Facebook and threatened to send out the images of her naked if she didn’t “put on a show” for him.

Sure enough, the pictures were forwarded to everyone, which drove her into depression. The anxiety was overwhelming, so she turned to drugs and alcohol to lessen the pain.

Eventually she made the decision to move to a new school in a new town to start fresh, but then the same stranger created a Facebook profile using her nude pictures as his default image. The word got around and she lost all her friends because all respect for her was lost.

The bullying started up again, and she began to cut herself. So she moved again to another school in hopes of finally being able to let go of her troubled past.

At her new school, she began to flirt with a boy who was already in a relationship. Thinking he liked her more than his girlfriend, she had a sexual relationship with him while his girlfriend was out of town.

The girlfriend found out about the affair, and became furious with the situation. So the angered girlfriend rallied a group of girls and beat up Todd to the ground. They left her in a ditch, and all of it was filmed on tape by other students for everyone to see.

Todd lay there in the ditch for hours until her father came and found her. As soon as she got home, she attempted to commit suicide by drinking Clorox bleach, which resulted in a trip to the hospital to flush it out of her system.

Even though Todd tried to stay strong, the bullying was just too much and caused her to think she had no place in this world. The sad part is that some people still make fun of her on Facebook, and people, especially teens, are taking the situation lightly.

People argue that it was all her fault and that she was the one who got herself into this mess, but nobody should be bullied to the point of wanting to die. Everyone makes mistakes, and messing up shouldn’t result in death.

When I was Todd’s age, I made some minor mistakes out of immaturity. Even though my mistakes weren’t to the same degree as her mistakes, I have gone through some ridicule and can see where she was coming from. I now see that she must have been bullied to an extreme considering it caused her to feel like dying was the only way out.

Death isn’t something people should joke about. Amanda Todd had her whole future in front of her, but now that’s gone. Her family now has to live with the fact their daughter is dead all because some ignorant teens decided it would be fun to bully a girl to her breaking point.

This is a wake-up call for high schoolers, and teens need to see how much words can really hurt. Some like to say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” but now we see that words can be deadly.