Alabama girl’s family says racist taunts, bullying led to suicide

McKenzie Adams wanted to be a scientist when she grew up. The 9-year-old excelled in math. But she also liked riding her bike, playing with dolls and PlayStation 4 and recording goofy home videos with her cousins, according to media reports in Alabama, where Adams attended elementary school in the city of Demopolis.

Instead of making plans to gather McKenzie and her cousins for Christmas, the child’s family is preparing to bury her Saturday after she hung herself. Her body was discovered Dec. 3 at their home in Linden, Ala., by her grandmother, family members told the Tuscaloosa News.

Now, they are blaming bullying for the death, saying the black fourth-grader had told teachers and an assistant principal at U.S. Jones Elementary School that she was being harassed.

Her mother, Jasmine Ad- ams, told a CBS affiliate that the abuse appeared to have been racially motivated, directed against her daughter because she was driven to school by a white family and had developed a friendship with a white boy. On Facebook, Adams mourned her daughter’s death, writing, “My world is gone.”

“She was being bullied the entire school year, with words such as ‘kill yourself,’ ” the girl’s aunt, Eddwina Harris, told the Tuscaloosa News. She was also told, “you think you’re white because you ride with that white boy,” Harris said, and called “ugly” and other unprintable epithets.

“Just die,” Adams was instructed, according to her aunt, who has turned the family member’s death into a call to action against bullying.

But the school — whose motto is, “Where hope begins and dreams come true” — disputes the family’s version of events.

Alex Braswell, an attorney for the Demopolis City Board of Education, said the school system conducted an internal investigation and found no basis for the family’s claims.

“We have concluded our internal investigation to the allegations of bullying which led to this senseless death,” he said. “There have been no findings of any reports of bullying by either the student or family. The findings of this internal investigation are consistent with the results of the investigation of the Linden Police Department at this point in time.”

Linden police Chief Robert Alston said his department was looking into the matter. “We weren’t able to confirm whether she was bullied or not at this point,” he said late Tuesday.

Other students may be able to shed light on the situation, Alston said, but the police investigation was made more difficult by the age of McKenzie and her classmates. “There’s resistance from parents who don’t want to get their kids caught up in this,” he said, calling the events “tragic.”