Charlie's Story

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On April 23, 2022, Charlie tragically took his own life at the age of just 14. Our hope is that his story can initiate change and prevent other families from experiencing the same tragedy. While complex, there are some key elements of Charlie’s experience that we wish could have been very different.

Charlie was born in Boise, Idaho, and spent most of his life in a small rural town in the Treasure Valley. His childhood was ideal, and he was a happy-go-lucky kid most of his life. He lacked for nothing, was well-traveled, loved playing baseball, and spent many a weekend in the Idaho mountains and outdoors. He was involved in church, was incredibly caring and compassionate, and had a witty sense of humor and loved to make people laugh. He had a heart for helping the homeless and loved the Boise Rescue Mission, giving of his own money and time when he could.

He spent all of his schoolyears in private schools, and thrived in his education – he was intellectually advanced enough to skip 4th grade and continued to do well in his close-knit school environment.

At age 11 he began to show rare glimpses of depression, though a school change for 7th grade seemed to change his mindset and his good-natured demeanor prevailed.

In the fall of 2020, he began 8th grade at age 12, and within weeks had spiraled into a drastically different person. His depression became severe, he became suicidal, and we sought counseling, visited doctors, and tried medication to no avail. We learned eventually that he was being bullied at school, and that he had been exposed to graphic sexual content on other kids cell phones at school.

We brought the cell phone issue and the bullying issue to the school, and our concerns were met with apparent indifference. After a couple months we had to pull him from school and enroll him in PHP at a local adolescent treatment center. This only exposed him to things far beyond his age level by other patients, corrupted his character, and made his mental health situation worse.

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He began to self-harm, and was completely closed off to any therapy. There was suspicion by a few different counselors that he had possibly been sexually abused at some point, though we were never able to confirm that. 

He ended up in a local mental health facility for a short time, and while there, he was physically assaulted by another patient.

We tried every possible avenue to treat his worsening situation and it seemed everything we tried only made his mental health state worse. We found there to be very limited resources available in Idaho for both him, and us as parents. We took every safety precaution at home that we could possibly think of, and searched exhaustively for alternative treatment options outside of Idaho that could address his unique needs at his age level. What he needed was trauma-informed therapeutic treatment. Our options in Idaho were limited to adolescent inpatient psychiatric lockdown. 

He stabilized enough in the spring of 2021 to graduate from his treatment program, and returned to relative normalcy for the summer, while also catching up on school at home.

That fall, we enrolled him in the same school, only because there was an administration change that we hoped meant things at the school might be different. He was now in high school and overall seemed to be stable as far as his mental health. But, he developed an eating disorder and within 6 weeks had lost 40 pounds – because he was so afraid the other kids would be cruel to him as they had been the prior year.

He attempted suicide in December of 2021, overdosing on his own anti-depressant medication. He spent 3 days in the ICU, and once recovered enough for release, the hospital insisted on only releasing him to a psychiatric care facility. We refused this option because he had previously been assaulted while hospitalized at an inpatient facility and we felt it would not be in the best interest of his mental health. We compiled a comprehensive care plan and brought him home with extreme precaution and safeguards.

He improved significantly following this, and returned to school.

In February he showed aggression to 2 separate students and was expelled from school. The same school that did nothing to help him when he was on the receiving end of being mistreated. He felt that he had to stand up for himself because the adults wouldn’t. 

No other public or charter school would accept him, so he began homeschool to finish his freshman year. In the weeks that followed, he still seemed to maintain relative normalcy and didn’t display signs of suicidal inclination at all.

On April 23, 2022, his 16 year old sister came home from work to find him struggling to breathe. She attempted CPR when he stopped breathing, while waiting for first responders to arrive.

He didn’t make it.

And our lives were shattered in ways that can never be recovered.

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We hope to see Charlie’s life and death as a catalyst for change in the state of Idaho and beyond, specifically in the following areas:

• Anti-Bullying Measures in Private Schools – many, if not most, have no anti-bullying measures in place and the response to bullying, in our experience, seems arbitrary. 

• Cell Phones & Kids – our own kids were not allowed to have cell phones, but due to lax enforcement of the no-phone policy at the school, they were still exposed to all the things we had tried to shield them from on other kids' phones. There has to be an effective solution for this problem. Our experience is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with cell phones & kids.

• Mental Health Resources for Introverts/Adolescents – the mental health resources for adolescents in the state of Idaho have not changed or improved much in the last 25 years. An effective solution is much needed in this area.

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