“No child should have to go through what my son went through.” In the poignant recording, the mechanic also explained the he and his wife didn’t feel the school treated their concerns seriously when they took Danny’s troubles to the principal.
“All I got was and all HE got was, ‘He’ll be fine. Is he in counselling? You have to try harder, Danny. These things will pass.’”
Daniel Sr. also had strong words for the parents of the boys Danny named in his suicide note: “You get to hold your children every night and every day for the rest of your lives and their natural lives.
I don’t get that anymore. Your little monsters took that from me. And my wife. And his sisters. Danny was a kind, gentle little soul. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body…
I just want to hear him say, ‘good morning, dad’ one more time and that way I could tell him ‘good morning’ and ‘I love you,’ which I did every every day.”
In their deepest grief, Daniel Fitzgerald’s family hopes that with their decision to publish his story, more attention will be directed to the problem of bullying and its fatal consequences.
Nothing can bring the 13-year-old back to life. But if others open their ears to victims of bullying and support them, perhaps other children can be saved from a similar fate.