High School male with AS stabs classmate.

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Here's a game a teacher will play: One kid bullies another and the bullied one screams at him to stop. The teacher admonishes the one who screams then tells him "just come to me." Then the bully does it again and the victim goes to the teacher. The teacher pretends to be deaf, just tunes him out completely. If the victim raises his voice to get the teacher's attention, the teacher puts him out of the classroom and notifies the principal.

I think that a lot of teachers still do this.

Our son has been bullied relentlessly in school, by the same kids regularly and by other kids semi-regularly.

We complained, cajoled, pulled him out of school, threatened lawsuit, etc.

It wasn't until we plainly stated "Look, if you (principal, staff) don't take care of this problem we are afraid that our son will take things into his own hands and take care of the problem himself, either by killing himself or exploding at the school".

All of a sudden it was important to the school authorities but unfortunately they were more focused on keeping our son away from the bullies rather than stopping the bullies from bullying.

We explained to the school that just because they're keeping our kid away from the bullies (which they weren't really) that it doesn't mean that some other kid that the bullies are bullying won't take matters into his/her own hands, therefore making the school unsafe for everyone.

Another thought... If the boy had killed himself rather than the bully, then technically the bully should have been held up for murder because he drove the kid to killing himself. It would never happen though and the bully would go on and bully someone else.

It doesn't matter that the bully was Special Ed just like the bullied kid, the bullying still should have been taken care of by the school authorities.

I won't say that murder is justified but I will say that we've been shown again and again that these bullied kids give up on the authorities doing anything and take matters into their own hands. I read somewhere that over 70% of school shooters were bullied relentlessly. Same for kids who kill themselves, the majority have been bullied and bullied and bullied. They give up on believing the adults will do anything and they're right because the adults DON'T do anything about it.

It should be a wake-up call but I'm sure it won't be. There's going to be more and more of this happening and I fear for my own children, not necessarily just about being bullied but possibly being present when a bullied child explodes.

The schools need to WAKE UP and address these problems NOW!

Also, the bullied child jumping in and saying "I did it" and "I don't want him to die" is typical of Asperger's kids, or at least of our Asperger's kid. He's very impulsive, has no grasp of cause and effect, would automatically admit that he did it and would genuinely be sorry that the bully died.

I hope that bullies will start learning that they have to stop doing this. I was bullied and beat up regularly (practically every day) and honestly I would have loved to have done them in and even to this day I harbor grudges against them for treating me that way. I find myself hoping that someone did stand up to them at some point someday...

From a sad and disillusioned mom...
Diane Dennis

No, it doesn't. In NTs this is seen as a healthy sign. It just shows that Aspies are perfectly able to let emotion rule over rational thinking.

http://www.milforddailynews.com/homepag ... 8114806783

Alenson = The_boy_That_Was_Murdered

Wow.

This story hits home... I did the same thing when I was 15. I turned in rage on a bully. Tried to stab him with a pen. Luckily I am small and weak! no one was hurt.
Got charged with assault, but fell under the Young Offenders' Act so my record got erased at 18 yo.

I am in no way or form condoning this behavior; simply stating that I know what it's like to lose that kind of control...
And that there has to be some way of stopping it before it's too late...

Whoa now! I don’t think it’s the AS in people that makes them think that way. It’s the victims of being bullied who are saying that mainly and who feel that way, AS or not. So please don’t pin that on just people with AS. I have AS very much so and I’ve seen the posts where people have said something about him standing up for himself. I don’t see it that way but if others do then that’s their right.

There are kids who have taken guns to school and started shooting and in a few of those cases they did it because they were being bullied. I can’t see that as “good for them, they stood up for themselves”.

In my opinion, if he stood up for himself the other boy would still be alive. He didn’t stand up for himself against the boy; he killed him. I don’t see it as self-defense either, knowing how it feels to be bullied; I would say he did it in anger.

I was picked on, teased and bullied all through school. I was a weirdo and an easy target. I hated the kids that did that to me but my self defense I guess came by resorting to my “inner” world and self talk. It didn’t make it easy to handle but it got me through it.

The whole thing is just very, very sad.

It would help so much if schools would intervene and they could but they won’t for whatever stupid reason. There’s no good excuse for it. It’s been going on for so long you would think they would have by now. Kids who do the bullying have issues themselves, they’re evil. They’re usually the ones that grow up and do the murdering as adults.

Whoa now! We dont KNOW that any bullying took place.

I agree that its the most likely explanation, but so far weve had 6 pages of bully-talk & on the basis of what? 1 innocent & quirky looking picture of the killer and a mention of ASD.

Hed better finish the job next time if hes going to a US prison

Today's Boston Globe goes into further detail about Ogdren. The local AS Association board member speaks in it as well.

Everyone says he murdered the other kid. But the story says after he stabed him, he did not want him to die. So to me the kid was defending himself from the other guy, and the other kid paid the ultimate price.

But Alenson is dead, and Ogdren deliberately brought a weapon into school and used it to kill. He talked about wanting to kill people. He MAY have plotted and planned a killing. There's multiple references to authorities believing this was premeditated. That's the very definition of murder. The fact that he "didn't want him to die" doesn't make it less of a murder. The boy still died at Ogdren's hand. That's probably a normal reaction once he realized what killing a human being, something he had been reportedly obsessed with, was really like. It's one thing to talk about it, it's another thing entirely to stab someone in the neck and through the heart and watch them bleed to death. If you can't feel remorse after doing that, there's a piece of your humanity missing.

There's been some speculation that the two didn't even know each other (reported yesterday on NPR); Ogdren may have been so frustrated by being bullied that he picked a 15 year old freshman clarinet player, speech team member, new to the school system, the type of kid that would also be bullied, to stab. But that's still speculation. Still, given the news that's coming out about the victim and attacker, the "self defense" theory is looking less and less likely, although I'll wait until the facts come out before saying what's true or untrue.

More will come out with time. There was another kid in that bathroom, and I'm sure he's got an idea of what happened.

So if we are to blame the kid for defending himself, we should put ALL the soldiers that have killed another in battle in jail for murder. Because thats the same thing. or if you shoot me and I shoot you, and I kill you for defending myself, i'm a cold blooded killer.

We don't know that he was defending himself from anything. Ogdren may have been an attacker, not defending himself from anything. There's been nothing reported that even suggests he was defending himself. If there is, please provide a link.

Also- Going to the bathroom at a school in Sudbury MA is not exactly the same thing as being on patrol in Iraq. Comparing the two is an ignorant thing to say. Use of deadly force is different legally and morally when in a war zone.

I'll stop arguing with you now, KenM. You have an opinion that this boy, who murdered another boy, is some sort of AS hero because he "stood up for himself". There's no evidence yet that he did anything of the sort. But there's evidence, as inconclusive as it is, that he may have been attacking another kid for no other reason except to feel the thrill of killing someone. He may have been the bully who took it too far. But nothing I say about this will convince you to wait on your judgment until facts come out. So I guess there's nothing more for me to say, except we'll see what really happened when the details come out.

I don't think bullying is OK. I think it's horrible. Bullying is not always deliberate, however. Bullies will bully based on their own insecurities. Sometimes they used to be bullied! So are you saying its ok for someone to be a bully as long as they were also a bully victim at some point in their life? The AS kid is a bully for using a lethal weapon on an unarmed classmate.

On another note, I also used to seem arrogant. I didn't belittle the idea. I just mentioned that other people don't like it at all.

Hey, a lot of other people rush to the judgement that he's a murderer.

I doubt that the facts will ever be in because school officials like to defend bullies and twist the facts around to make the victim look bad. I've been in those situations before where I was questioned about what happened in a way that demanded that I give them the answer that I wanted to hear or the teacher would hit me in the face, hard. Things haven't changed that much in a few years. My family is having to deal with a lying piece of trash school official at one school right now. She is deliberately doing harm to my nephew and is also pretending to be afraid of him. Her attitude may have a grain of truth to it because she is deliberately causing him enough problems to make any sane person hate her.

If the attitude is that they have these rules to protect children from bullies, even if this requires penalizing people for legitimate self defense, then they need to be wherever they need to be to defend people from bullies instead of disappearing into the teacher's lounge and leaving the children unsupervised, which is what they did that left me having to wade through the vicious little rabid beasts on the way to my locker.

Prescott, get one thing through your head: Bullies kill. Bullies make a person die each day. The idea that it is wrong to hurt them is based on the false premise that they don't kill others. If they don't kill by direct action, they kill by torturing people who are trapped in that prison with them, and their victims commit suicide or homicide-suicide. Sometimes their victims are too far gone by the time that they get out of high school and will never be able to get their heads together enough to become a doctor, a lawyer, a physicist, or anything that requires a person's head to be together. I do blame bullying for what happened to me and I consider it to be verbal abuse to tell me otherwise.

The way that they protect bullies I have seen that the school protects them from their victims far better than they protect the victims from the bullies. In my school the bullies were untouchable, not to be penalized, and their victims blamed for anything that the bullies did. I think I've said before that if I were the principal of the school, I would not give a damn if we could never field a football team, because those goons were going to be students first and they were not going to play football if they were bullying the smaller students.

That's not the same thing. If "bullying" were an incident once in a great while, it would cause much less harm. I don't feel like the AS kid was a bully for defending himself with lethal force. There is no way that in one act he became the one who was always dishing it out instead of having to take it silently. His stabbing one classmate does not erase the fact of any bullying that he had to suffer before he felt that he had to do what he did, and striking back in self defense is not bullying.

There is no doubt that stabbing another human being is wrong, not to mention, illegal. But like some others, I do think that it is important to consider the circumstances that led to this tragic incident. For many Aspergians, bullying is something that we put up with all our lives - at school, at work and perhaps even at home. When Aspergians talk about getting beat up by NTs because we are different, it often means that we are being bullied or punished for our nonconformist ways. Aspergians usually are already depressives with low self-esteem, the impact of socially sanctioned bullying can easily push a vulnerable individual over the edge.

Let us suppose that the kid had not stabbed another person, let us say that he killed himself by cutting his wrists and left a suicide note telling the world that he could not go on because of the bullying that had been taking place. In this case, who would you blame? I suspect that everyone would be pointing fingers at the bully and demand that some kind of action be taken to rein in the culprit.

Different scenario, same impetus. What I wish to highlight is the vulnerability of Aspergians to all sorts of social pressures. It does not diminish the responsibility of the individual who stabbed his classmate, but the accused does deserve some degree of sympathy. His life is over and no matter what he does henceforth, he will be branded by this act of violence.

How many Aspergians have thought of resorting to violence to end the misery? Whether it is hurting others or yourself, for many it does appear to be the only way out of the morass of being a permanent misfit. What this kid did was wrong, but there are many of us who have thought of getting back at the people who torment us or of ending our own existence to put an end to things.