Family finds son researched suicide at school
To explain 12-year-old’s death, parents scoured Lincoln Park home
In his last school play performance, 12-year-old Gabe Deely played a member of the Lollipop Guild in the “The Wizard of Oz,” waving a giant lollipop while wearing a brightly colored costume topped off with a red hat adorned with a yellow flower.
The seventh grader at St. Clement Catholic School in Chicago loved theater and choir. He approached his Lollipop Guild part with seriousness, but had fun with the somewhat whimsical role. He was a little nervous before the show, but his older sister, who played Auntie Em, was there with him.
His family remembers him that night as a happy kid, doing a goofy dance and waving the lollipop.
Months later, just before Thanksgiving 2018, Gabe died of suicide.
His family couldn’t make sense of it, having seen no warning signs. They struggled to even comprehend a child that young contemplating suicide.
Searching for an explanation about their son’s death, Carol Deely and her husband scoured the computers and phones at their Lincoln Park home. They found nothing.
Later, though, they learned he
had used a school iPad to research suicide, leading them to believe that he was thinking about his death. They were heartbroken at what they believed was a missed opportunity for intervention.
“We thought we couldn’t be hurt any worse, but this was pretty close,” his mother said.
The iPad had been kept at St. Clement, a school in the Lincoln Park neighborhood that is overseen by the Archdiocese of Chicago. The Deelys received two weeks of search history from the school that showed that Gabe had researched bullying, along with suicide. He had also accessed sexually inappropriate content that should have been blocked.
“Many parents monitor their kids’ devices. I did,” Deely said. “I just assumed the school was too.”
The Deelys said that after they obtained the two weeks of search history for the iPad, they got a lawyer involved because they wanted the iPad with full search history from the school or the archdiocese. The school’s principal and vice principal told them they had to communicate with the archdiocese lawyers, with whom they negotiated to receive the search history. A letter Carol wrote to Cardinal Blase Cupich went unanswered.
“Their actions compounded our grief,” she said. “They were more interested in protecting themselves than protecting children.”
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese in December declined an interview and did not answer specific questions. In a statement, the spokeswoman said archdiocese schools “are required to implement systems to ensure it is not used to access digital content inappropriate for students,” and that St. Clement had met that requirement.
Now, Carol Deely is on a mission to encourage schools and parents to use technology-monitoring software that would alert adults if children search for certain keywords, like suicide or guns. The technology grew popular after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.
She founded a nonprofit organization, Gabriel’s Light, to raise awareness for the issues and work with schools on monitoring their technology. Deely is also working on including educational programming related to bullying. She said she is seeking to obtain 501(c)(3) status for the organization. In the meantime, the group has set up a fund through the Chicago Community Trust, which partners with local organizations, to handle donations.
“You have to be diligent. If you’re going to give a child a device, it’s your responsibility,” Deely said.
‘So cheerful’
Carol Deely had her third child as she neared 40, but she and her husband, Brendan, wanted to continue expanding their family. So they adopted Gabe in 2006 through an agency that facilitates adoptions in Ethiopia. His middle name, Chufamo, was his Ethiopian birth name.
He was their first boy, joining a family of three girls, then 6, 4 and 3 years old. Later, the Deelys adopted their fifth child, another boy, from Ethiopia.
Gabe was born in July, and the Deelys brought him to their Chicago home just before Christmas. That first holiday, they were jetlagged and tired with an infant, but they celebrated with family members and made it to Mass at St. Clement Church, where Carol and Brendan were married in 1996.
Gabe grew into a little boy who liked to make people laugh. He played basketball and other sports, mostly for the socializing. He was never competitive, his mother said. He liked acting and singing, often participating in school plays.
“He had this super cute smile,” Deely said. “It was hard to get mad at him.”
They visited Ethiopia several times, and Gabe met his birth family. They learned he looked a lot like his birth mother. He was once the model for a picture book about adoption. Around 5 years old then, he smiles from the cover of the book, his mouth open as if he was talking. The book is now propped on a coffee table in the family’s living room.
“He was just so cheerful,” Deely said, crying softly in her home, decorated throughout with touches of orange, Gabe’s favorite color. “We had such a close family.”
Suicides among children
The winter that followed Gabe’s death on Nov. 14, 2018, was a blur. The other four children dropped out of their activities. One of Gabe’s sisters wore the same outfit to school every day, until a teacher asked her if she needed money for new clothes. They did family therapy and individual therapy.
“What was the first thing that made us happy again?” Deely wondered, months later. “I can’t remember.”
Though still struggling, the family is improving slowly, having survived all the “firsts” of the first year, like his birthday, and the first Christmas without him.
Children can understand the concept of suicide around the age of 7, said Jonathan Singer, a professor of social work at Loyola University Chicago and president of the American Association of Suicidology. The youngest suicidal client he has had was 4.
“There is some research to suggest kids that age understand suicide better than they understand the concept of death by itself,” he said. “It’s easier for them to think about doing something to themselves that results in their death rather than just some abstract concept of dying.”
The number of young children dying by suicide remains a small proportion of total suicide deaths, making it difficult to study and determine patterns, Singer said.
In Cook County, there have been more than 2,300 suicide deaths since 2015, according to data from the medical examiner’s office. Of those, 68 were minors younger than 18, and 14 were children younger than 13. The youngest reported suicide victim in Cook County since 2015 was 10.
But a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in October found that the suicide rate among young people aged 10 to 24 rose from 2007 to 2017, even as it held steady in an earlier period from 2000 to 2007.
‘He was thinking about it’
When their examination of their home technology yielded nothing, the Deely family was still trying to understand what happened. So about two weeks after Gabe died, the St. Clement principal and vice principal came to their home at the family’s request.
They said they would hand over the iPad and help in any way they could, Deely said. Later, though, they told the family the archdiocese’s legal department said they couldn’t release the iPad, and the administrators stopped communicating with the family, Deely said.
Then, as the Deely family was facing their first Christmas without Gabe, they received the two-week search history from St. Clement, Carol Deely said. They learned he had used the school tablet to research suicide. Later, they received a death certificate from the Cook County medical examiner’s office that listed the death as a suicide.
“He was thinking about it,” Deely said of the suicide.
“How could we have missed it?” she said, beginning to cry.
Deely had signed an agreement when the school issued the iPad that said the school monitored it. She said she later learned from school administrators that they only individually monitored iPads if they had reason to be concerned. She also noted that her son had accessed inappropriate content that should have been blocked in a school.
She worried about the contagiousness of suicides. If another student was using the school’s devices to plan a suicide, the school would not know. Parents might have a false sense of security, believing school devices to be monitored.
When asking experts for best practices in monitoring her youngest son’s technology use, she learned about a company called Bark, which sends parents and schools alerts when someone uses certain search terms. She pays $9 a month to use it for her family devices. Schools can use it for free. The monitoring technology is used in 155 public school districts, or private or charter schools in Illinois, 45 of which are in the Chicago area, according to a Bark spokesperson.
If someone searches suicide, for example, Deely gets an alert with suggestions on ways to handle it.
“It takes the monitoring away from a teacher or parent who would have to look through stuff,” Deely said.
The technology is most often used by schools to identify risks related to school shootings, though some of the monitoring software is still a work in progress, Singer said. He noted an example where a school was flooded with warnings after a bomb cyclone went through the area because students’ use of the word “bomb” triggered the alerts.
Schools also need to ensure they have the proper staff and expertise for screenings and intervention in order to react appropriately when they get alerts from the technology.
“They need to set that up in advance,” he said.
Still, using technology to aid in suicide prevention is the way of the future, he said.
“We will be using technology moving forward as a way of identifying and responding to youth suicide risk,” Singer said.
As time has passed, the Deely family has slowly emerged from the raw freshness of their grief. It’s a bittersweet feeling. Deely is relieved the family has survived the first year, but the more time that passes, the longer Gabe has been gone, which hurts too.
The family wants something positive to come from their experience, so they founded the nonprofit, Gabriel’s Light, late last year in order to work with schools and parents to help them use monitoring technology.
One suburban school they have worked with had the monitoring technology but realized it was not set up properly. The school corrected it the day before Thanksgiving, Deely said, and received an alert about a student. A social worker was able to intervene.
“That’s the type of thing we want to do,” she said.