Shortly after, the 11-year-old boy from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula hanged himself.his death. Marquette County Prosecuting Attorney Matt Wiese said the girl posed as someone else when she was texting with Tysen and faked her own death. And the boy, for reasons still unclear, believed it and killed himself within two hours of receiving the messages, Wiese said.
Wiese said he could not confirm the relationship between Tysen and the girl, but media reports say she was his girlfriend.
“The impact that it had on the boy — there’s a logical connection,” Wiese told The Washington Post. “He did this within hours of the conversation happening via text.”The girl, whose name was not released, has been charged with malicious use of telecommunication service, punishable by up to six months in juvenile detention; and using a computer to commit a crime, which carries up to a year in punishment. Both are misdemeanor charges.
The incident happened on March 14. Nothing seemed amiss when he came home from school earlier that day, said the boy’s mother, Katrina Goss, of Marquette, Mich. After dinner, Tysen went up to his room.
Shortly after 10 p.m., Goss went to each of her three sons’ rooms to tuck them in. Tysen’s door was locked, but she was able to open it with her key. At first, she thought her middle son was hiding or playing a trick because he wasn’t in his bed.
“I went in and I thought he was being silly,” Goss told The Post. “I ended up finding him in the closet . … I tried to hurry up and lift him up. I was screaming. I told my oldest son to call 911. My littlest one was bawling.”Goss said the paramedics were able to revive Tysen. The boy was hospitalized for three weeks before he died on Tuesday at a Detroit-area hospital.
Goss said her son often used Snapchat. The night he died, she said he was texting and talking on Snapchat with the 13-year-old girl, who was using someone else’s account when she told Tysen that his girlfriend had died. No one warned her son that it was all a prank, Goss said.
“She used her friend’s account to make it even more proof that she’d died,” Goss said. “He was so innocent, so kindhearted and so naive that he completely believed her and he took his own life.”Wiese, the prosecutor, said there was some reference to Snapchat in the text exchange, but it’s unclear what was said on the social media app because investigators have been unable to obtain those messages.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Goss described her son’s death as the result of “a twisted, sick joke” delivered in the form of cyberbullying on social media. She said she wants to raise awareness about how social media platforms influence children’s actions.
“I want him to basically be the face of the cause. It’s a serious issue that I feel is completely skirted,” Goss said. “The way that children are using social media currently in this day and age is just terrible.”
The Washington Post
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