Newsletter 3.23-3- article
After Adriana Kuch’s Suicide, Community Grapples with Bullying
Amid grief and outrage over the death of Adriana Kuch, 14, students have mounted protests, and a schools superintendent has resigned.
Fourteen-year-old Adriana Kuch told her father that she could not bear the humiliation after she was attacked by another girl inside her New Jersey high school and a clip of the assault was posted to TikTok.
“She said, ‘I don’t want to be that girl who gets beat up on video and made fun of,’” Adriana’s father, Michael Kuch, recalled his daughter saying as they sat in the kitchen of their home in Bayville, NJ
The day after the Feb. 1 assault, Adriana retreated to her room at about 10 p.m. and took her own life during the night, he said.
The attack, which her father has accused the school district of mishandling, and Adriana’s suicide have reverberated through Ocean County communities near the Jersey Shore and across the state. Public grieving and outrage have led officials to grapple anew with the prevalence of bullying in schools, how it affects children, and the response — or lack of one — by administrators.
In recent days, students have protested in front of Adriana’s high school, the superintendent of the Central Regional School District has resigned and four girls have been criminally charged in connection with the assault.
It isn’t clear what the motive was for the attack, which occurred on a Wednesday just before 11 a.m., but a video recording of the incident shows it apparently had been planned. In the video, Adriana, with long, light brown hair, walks down a school hallway along a bank of lockers, smiling and chatting with a male friend. Another girl comes up from behind and hits Adriana in the face with what appears to be a water bottle.
As Adriana falls to the ground, her friend pushes the attacker away. But another student seems to intervene to hold him back, and the girl continues to pummel Adriana until a staff member rushes over and stops the attack.
Mr. Kuch said Adriana, his youngest child, was part of a large, blended family they had formed when he married his wife, Sarah. He and others said that Adriana had been a happy teenager who loved animals, spent time with the younger triplets of a neighbor across the street, and rescued one of them from a pool.