Meet the Creators and Activists Leading Social Media's Next Wave Why some stories of this stripe loom so large over the public imagination, while others receive little to no attention, is itself complicated. Jadin’s death was a big story, but not a unique one. Much of the coverage inevitably had to confront the ways that bullying, in itself, had also changed, as technology had changed, and social lives - anonymity, access to others, video cameras and messaging apps on every phone - have played into some of our worst instincts. The coverage was motivated, in part, by the pained irony that an ostensibly more progressive nation - nudged forward from above by changing (if contested) political policies and more visibly out-and-proud celebrities and from below by a more accepting generation of young people - was still home to tragedies such as these. Like many queer teens before him and, it’s painful to say, many since his death, Jadin was subject to intense bullying - mistreatment that became the primary point of order of the expansive news coverage following his death. He’d dreamed of becoming an artist, of going to New York City for college - of, at the very least, getting the hell out of La Grande.
In January 2013, a gay 15-year-old named Jadin Bell, from La Grande, Oregon, hanged himself from a piece of playground equipment and, after being kept on life support for several weeks, died in early February that year.
