Death of nonbinary teen Nex Benedict after school fight is ruled a suicide, medical examiner says
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The death of a nonbinary student the day after a fight inside an Oklahoma high school restroom has been ruled a suicide, the state medical examiner’s office said Wednesday.
A summary autopsy report was released more than a month after the death of 16-year-old Nex Benedict, a student at Owasso High School. Family members said Benedict had been bullied at school and the teenager’s death in February drew concern from LGBTQ+ rights groups, as well as attention from Oklahoma’s governor and the White House.
“From the beginning of this investigation, Owasso Police observed many indications that this death was the result of suicide,” Owasso Police Department Lt. Nick Boatman said in a statement. “However, investigators did not wish to confirm that information without the final results being presented by the Oklahoma Medical Examiners Office.”
In a 911 call on Feb. 8, Sue Benedict — the teen’s grandmother and legal guardian — had expressed concern about a head injury. The teenager was conscious and alert after the fight a day earlier when they told police about the attack by three girls that occurred after the teen squirted them with water, according to police video released last month.
15 comments
Okay let's say they did kill themself, it really doesn't change anything. It doesn't change that they were beaten up and that their life was pretty much a living hell. Because of the laws in Oklahoma.
LibsofTikTok still has blood on her hands.
@shy #192285
These are people that believe blood washes away their sins. They feel cleaner for group complicity in the act. The spectacle also makes for quite the implied threat. They will kill your children in broad daylight, publicly claim the implausible and ludicrous, flaunt that all legal recourse goes through their own hands, and ultimately you will be the villain of their story because they are the collective “good” that must be preserved while you are the “filth” they need protection from.
I’m reminded a little of the film version of Needful Things, the festering pit that was Castle Rock and it’s people. Gaunt walked into town and barely had to nudge the mask of civility they collectively wore to reveal the monsters underneath. It’s infuriating really, that what most people take away from that is the idea of a single unchecked stranger shaking up the norms being the sign of evil. But the evil was already there that was the point. Owasso didn’t need an allegory for the devil to come into town, no matter how hard they try to pin that description to Nex. To them, Gaunt would more or less be a model neighbour.
OK. Suicide it is. But that would mean the bullying they endured would have had a negative effect on mental health. Thus the state having laws against LGBT enabled the bullying which led to suicide. And Ryan Walters and Libs of TikTok also are culpable. If anything it actually worsens it for state and walters, ot showed they did fucking nothing to help. Had the girls murdered Nex, at least state, school and Walters et al could easily scapegoat the girls and pretend to care about the violence and pass, cymically, laws to condemn bullying. By having as a suicide, the girls are still culpable but it shows where schoolnand state fucked up. Congrats. In tryimg to defend killers you made yourselves look worse. To boot didn't Chaya have an interview that she fucking botched?
They’re claiming that the cause of death was due to a bad reaction to mixing allergy medication with antidepressants, and the attack was either coincidental or accelerated a death which was going to happen soon anyway. Which is apparently not impossible, it’s just an extremely improbable thing which no one could have realistically predicted… assuming it’s true, which there is a good reason to doubt, particularly since the medical examiner who did the autopsy isn’t certified as a forensic pathologist (there are apparently none in Oklahoma, which is weird). In cases like this, it’s legally ruled as an “accidental suicide”, so it’s not like they’re claiming that Nex committed “suicide by bully”, as some people are interpreting it.
That being said, regardless of whether this is a coverup, incompetence, or a freak coincidence, the attackers are still legally culpable for physical assault at minimum (and potentially two counts, given that Nex was attacked for protecting their friend). So it will be interesting to see whether they actually stand trial, or it goes away quietly.
Was the autopsy realised by coroners in Russia or in China? Because, when someone suffer head injuries after having been beaten, it’s not suicide but manslaughter in minimum.
@Passerby #192286
Yeah: Gaunt just had to gift trinkets in exchange of “pranks” to have Castle Rock fighting over racial and religious bigotry, along with petty hatred and resentment, he did this to settlemnts since the Black Death and will do it again in Arkansas.
Stephen King’s style, to have a single supernatural element in the midst of a realistic and rational setting, shows well how civilization is often a thin venner easy to break.
There’s also all these pogroms and lynchings where perpetrators took pictures of themselves.
@Zinnia #192315
Yeah, that’s something else that keeps getting swept under the rug. Nex took the attention off somebody else that was getting physically accosted, someone who would probably be dead instead if they didn’t. That person is going to be staring down a city of cold blooded killers concocting their next series of highly improbable coincidences that led to a death that only appears to be related to physical injuries inflicted upon the victim but was actually really all their fault and they’d have dropped dead even without getting hit by a car on the sidewalk (recklessly obstructing traffic) or dragged into an alley and tortured for hours (cavorting about the streets looking for trouble) or jumped by a gang of students (picking a fight) or summarily shot multiple times for being in the line of a “good person’s” sight and the justification is a retroactive roulette wheel that just keeps spinning until something sticks and their only recourse is to be a hostage of their own community or be driven from it. Either way, letting evil win. Because when this happens again - and it inevitably will - the message is keep walking or you’re next.
@JeanP #192318
It’s a common theme that comes up in Steven King’s novels; the “nice close-knit rural community” that turns out to be a den of absolutely awful people. Another good example of this outside of King is David Lynch’s movies, which frequently feature nice settings with a seedy underbelly of rank corruption (Blue Velvet is probably the best example, but there are some shades of this in Mulholland Dr. as well).
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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