Bullying in school environments is by no means a rare or recent development. However, it would appear that the intensity and consequences have reached new and devastating levels in the most recent cases. I was shocked to find out that there have been five recent teen suicides due to bullying at my current hometown high school. According to the website of one of my local news outlets, www.foxnews.com, there have been four cases of teen suicide due to bullying at Mentor High School (Mentor, Ohio) in just over three years. The suicides involved a teenager bullied for being gay, one bullied for learning difficulties, one for a boy who liked to dress pink, one for an antidepressant overdose, and the most recent case; Sladjana Vidovic. Sladjana was a sixteen year old Croatian girl; who tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around her bedpost and jumped out of her bedroom window in 2008. In Sladjana's suicide note, she wrote about the daily torture she endured at Mentor High . According to Fox News, she has been called names like "slut-Jana" and "slut-Jana-vagina." She had food thrown, a water bottle thrown in her face, was attacked because of her strong accent and was pushed down the stairs. Sladjana endured this cruel behavior from her peers despite, or perhaps because, she was beautiful, charming and enthusiastic. It may seem like this story is already as terrible as it could be, but it gets worse. According to Sladjana's parents, they had repeatedly begged the school to help the situation. The school promised it would, but nothing was done. A week before taking her own life, Sladjana had dropped out of Mentor High and enrolled in an online school,...... middle of paper... Nuss. Associated press. “Families sue Ohio school after four bullied teens die by their own hands.” FoxNews.com. Fox News. 08 October 2010. Web.10. November 2011.2.) np Bullyingstatistics.org. Bullying statistics. nd Web. 10 November 2011.3.) np Teendepression.org. Adolescent depression. nd Web. November 10, 2011.4.) Debra Bradly Ruder. “A work in progress: the adolescent brain.” Harvardmagazine.com. Harvard. September-October 2008. Network. November 10, 2011.5.) Gary Goshgarian. Kathleen Krueger. Dialogues: A Rhetoric and Argument Reader. 7th edition. New York: Longmann. 2011. Print. 176 of 10 November. 2011.