S.C. father blames bullying for son’s suicide, on quest for school accountability

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article discusses suicide. Reader discretion is advised. If you or someone you know needs help or support, call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.

DORCHESTER COUNTY, S.C. (WCSC) - A Dorchester County man has started a mission to demand that schools do more to protect students from bullying after he lost his teenage son to suicide.

Jason Brockert says his teenage son, Julian, began having problems fitting in during middle school right after the pandemic, despite his son doing “all the right things.”

“He would handle it by trying to talk to his friends or the bullies and that didn’t work. So, then he’d talk to the teachers and that didn’t work,” he says. “And he talked to Lisa and myself and so we talked to the teachers and that didn’t work. And then we raised it to the administration and then it kind of seemed to go away.”

But Brockert says the bullying had not stopped.

“Julian just got better about not talking about it because he saw that the system was failing,” he says. “That resulted in him trying to defend himself by taking a pocket knife to school in December of 2022. He didn’t threaten anybody. He didn’t brandish it. But somebody saw him with it and they turned him in as appropriate as they should have.”

Last year, Julian Brockert took his own life.

Though South Carolina has laws against bullying and each school district has policies on how to deal with it, the fallout can be deadly. Coroner reports show that since 2020, 36 people under the age of 18 have taken their own lives in Charleston, Berkeley and Dorchester Counties alone.

The youngest victim listed in those reports was just 12 years old.

Anna Mendez, with the National Association for People Against Bullying, says what happened with Julian is not uncommon.

“Many times, you feel the need to respond to violence with additional violence and then all of a sudden the victim has become the bully and now they’re being charged,” she says. “And we’re hearing stories as well that parents are losing their patience and they’re beginning to act out and lash out and yell and scream and threaten the bully and now they’re in more trouble than they should have been.”

The anti-bullying advocate believes zero tolerance policies some schools practice are often ineffective.

“Often, schools see it as a way of of getting out of having to take actual action. A no-tolerance policy can also mean that when an altercation occurs, regardless of who started it, who’s at fault, both parties end up being in trouble and being punished,” she says.

Mendez champions an approach known as restorative justice in tackling bullying. She says it’s not just about the bully and the victim, but engaging with school counselors, psychiatrists, and teachers.

The Charleston County School District employs a similar strategy in confronting bullying.

Lisa Allison, who serves as executive director for the district’s Student Support Services, says 20% of students don’t report bullying.

“So we really need to make sure that instead of zero tolerance or consequence first that we really lead with we want schools to be safe,” she says.

The Berkeley County School District responded to a request for information on how it handles bullying by saying its schools provide anti-bullying individual sessions and group sessions based on cases and incidences to determine the root causes of these behaviors.