Posted on 10/11/2013 11:54:20 AM PDT by matt04
A popular 15-year-old student has committed suicide after he reportedly faced expulsion and could have been placed on the sex offenders' register simply for streaking at a high school football game. Christian Adamek, from Huntsville, Alabama, hanged himself on October 2, a week after he was arrested for running naked across the Sparkman High football field during a game. The teenager died two days later from his injuries and on Wednesday, friends and family gathered at a memorial service as they struggled to comprehend the beloved student's death. A video of Adamek streaking during a game against a rival team was posted on YouTube hours after the event and students took to Twitter to call him a 'legend'.
...
Sparkman High Principal Michael Campbell told WHNT a day before the suicide attempt that the teen could face major repercussions because of his actions. 'There's the legal complications,' Campbell said. 'Public lewdness and court consequences outside of school with the legal system, as well as the school consequences that the school system has set up.'
In Alabama, indecent exposure is linked to the state's sex offender laws, meaning that he could have found himself on the sex offenders register due to the streaking.
Campbell added that that the incident was not just a prank and needed to be treated seriously. Sparkman High administrators even recommended that Adamek face a hearing in the Madison County court system to determine if formal charges would be filed, WHNT reported.
Adamek had also been disciplined by the school district but the details had not been made public. The day before the suicide attempt, the principal had confirmed that Adamek was not at school and the teenager's sister suggested on Twitter that Adamek faced expulsion, AL.com reported.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Well, gee, it isn't like they found stolen jewelry and burglar tools in a backpack in the kid's locker.
May be, but political correctness on the part of the school and the legal system caused him to kill himself. Not a real good way to deal with your "other issues", is it.
Excellent work, Principal Campbell, for getting a dangerous criminal off the streets. (do I HAVE to /s?)
“Then, they retire, having added nothing to anybodys safety.”
Having added nothing to society, period. Lord, save us from the list makers. Oh, and from those who keep the “permanent records”.
Of course that happened normally after the third or fourth keg was popped open...
It was way more of a dare than a sexual thing...
morons...
Terribly sad. Should have been handled solely by the school. And it seems someone should have been closer to this poor kid in that last week when he must have exhibited at least some signs of distress.
This is part of what Christina Hoff Sommers has written of in her “The War Against Boys”. That it should have come to this tragic. And that school’s principal should be horse whipped.
Care to direct us to the Youtube video of you running naked across a football field and the ensuing arrest?
While off topic, would you be supportive of an individual walking along a sidewalk who suddenly drops his pants and exposes himself in front of your eight year old daughter waiting for her school bus?
I fall back on history as my guide.
In recent decades has any student been charged with a sex registry crime for streaking a school function?
Not that I could find on Google.
Seems to me that knowledge of a harsh legal consequence like that would have been promulgated to every high school student in Alabama BEFORE they decided to streak.
If I'm wrong, I'll apologize and retract.
Really? Using absolutely authority to publically shame and threaten a completely innocent 15 year old that he is going to be expelled, jailed and labeled a sex offender for the rest of his life for a harmless and extremely commont prank isn't enough to bring on a suicidal crisis?
You must be a public school administrator. I can tell by the depth of your insight, experience and compassion.
Ira Magaziner’s legacy.
Gonna have to disagree with you - I can and do generalize, and quite forcefully. What you are saying I said for a long time. But about 20 years ago, public schools went full-on malevolent, full time. Your friend the Christian teacher is absolutely opposite ALL public school mandates if she remains firm to her Christian values. In fact, she can't even invoke those values without endangering her job.
Public schools have been turned into student destruction colonies that teach one thing only - abject obedience to administrative totalitarianism and the absolute punishment of everything male. And the teachers and administrators who run these institutes of destruction have been hired not only for their willingness to carry out these hideous "lessons," but for their sadistic enjoyment of them.
If I ran things, there would be NO public school. The closest thing would be school vouchers - that's it. Public school employees are WILDLY out of control, and absolutely destroying entire generations of children with self-rightious glee. They are frightening people, morally void and sick in their souls.
No, as I said, I don’t support it. As a matter of fact, I expressly said the opposite.
The point is, people are stupid. We all have our moments. We are people, after all. We can strive to be better, and not be satisfied with a lower standard. But none of us is perfect, so we have to constantly strive.
And we learn our lessons.
If we’re lucky.
Some of us aren’t so lucky. So many of us die young, and not through the violence of others, but due to our own fallibility. In this we are fortunate, most of us haven’t had to live through times where the less quick people are culled. Most of us haven’t died in wars. We’ve been lucky.
The point is, the older you get, the more things you live through, you are less likely to succumb to those things that kill younger men. Car crashes at high speed are the domain of the young, as are many other traumatic deaths they suffer.
But when you are 15, there is so much you don’t know, and you often don’t possess enough commonsense to compensate for it.
So you make mistakes.
Like running across a field stark naked in front of thousands of people.
At 15, you haven’t seen the bad turns that things can take, and you don’t understand all the ramifications of things. You learn. When I was 12, living in the Philippines, I went snorkeling with my brothers over a good sized reef, Grande Island near Subic Bay. When we went out, it was sunny and the water was pretty calm. As we swam six feet over the tops of the dinner table-sized coral reef heads at high tide, it was idyllic. Canyons of colorful coral below us. We swam probably 200 yards out, we weren’t paying attention, and weather moved in.
To make it worse, the tide had been going out. Next thing I knew, we were trying to swim back to shore, and the rough water made it so you were in constant danger of being dashed on the coral that was just a foot or two below. My brother must have gotten stranded by low water over a large area of coral, and he stood up on the coral. He was on the edge, and it gave way. The backs of both of his legs were bleeding from large scratches and gouges that happened when he slid against the broken coral edges as he plummeted in.
We survived, and that lesson has served me well my entire life. I keep a closer eye on the weather around me, especially when I am on the water. But a lot of people don’t survive to learn that lesson. And that is just one thing.
What this kid who streaked across that football field didn’t get a chance to learn was how to manage himself. Perhaps it was the lack of a role model to teach him self-control. Maybe he wasn’t smart enough to learn that actions often have ramifications. And he didn’t have the experience to consider whether he was prepared to accept those ramifications. Sometimes there just isn’t any commonsense to pitch in and help that 15 year old boy figure things out.
And when the deed is done, and the reality of what has transpired sinks in, if the person hasn’t had the experience or commonsense to avoid doing that thing, it is a complete surprise to that 15 year old boy. I would think that could be pretty disorienting to some 15 year old boys. It could be a lot to take in at once.
Why should this kid have even be threatened to be put on a sex offender list is nearly incomprehensible to me. A fifteen year old with that stigma might well think his life is ruined forever. As you get older, you understand that type of thing may NOT actually be fatal, but can even open a pathway for you (Think of an alcoholic who survives hitting rock bottom and turns his life around)
You can see something that is at first blush so terrible, there is no way you can go on, but after you have survived it, you may consider it the single most valuable and important thing that ever happened to you in your life, and would have nothing you would trade it for.
This 15 year old hadn’t lived long enough to to recognize that incredible fact, that your stupidity may actually open a door for you that shapes who you will become. And that it can be a positive thing in the end.
But that is what I think happened to this 15 year old kid. It saddens me.
That’s why one of her students (who was pregnant and had a baby) later went to live with my friend’s mom and her husband (along with her twin sister), and that THIS girl later gave her heart to The Lord! How do you explain that!~
Now, it is more like "God, save us from the fury of the do-gooders."
RIP.
Completely innocent would imply he was falsely accused of streaking, which isn’t the case.
He pulled a stupid prank. Should it have gotten some punishment? Sure...police cars need washing too, or trash picked up, or similar.
To lump an idiot kid who pulled a prank in with Chester the Molester only serves to both ruin the kid as we saw here, and make the Chesters of this world less likely to be seen as the true danger that they are. When it’s common knowledge that a large amount of the list either urinated in public, or got caught with a gf one year younger, or something equally silly, the list becomes “the boy who cried wolf” and serves to hide the real wolves.
We need to abolish public education!
Either home school or contract it out!
If folks Waite for marriage, you could avoid all those hangups.
The sex offender list is out of control, many have been put on it for being caught peeing.
it seems out of control to me, and definitely for a 15 year old kid.
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