A Boy Lost, a Link to Heartbreak

It was a story shocking in its facts and implications:

“An 11-year-old boy--distraught over being rejected by his 12-year-old girlfriend over the Internet--hanged himself in the bathroom of his family’s home. . . .”

That was the news account when Gideon Green died. But the truth is more complicated . . . and more threatening.

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He was a typical boy blessed with extraordinary talents. A genius who wrote poetry and computer programs, loved skateboarding and kayaking, studied Latin and the electric guitar.

A child bright enough to walk off with honors at the county science fair but too naive to know how to fend off an aggressive 12-year-old girl.

It was naivete--both Gideon’s and his parents’--that led to his death in September 1997. He’d met the girl at summer camp in Malibu the month before. She lived over the hill, but their romance blossomed--like sixth-graders’ do these days--through telephone calls and online chats.

Gideon’s mom was uncomfortable, though. Her son had just turned 11; the girl was almost 13. It was too much, too soon, she thought, for a boy she still tucked into bed each night.

“It seemed like an obsession,” his mother recalled. “She’d call and leave messages four or five times a day. I told him it was inappropriate; it had to stop.”

He delivered the message, and the phone calls ceased. But the computer chats continued--unbeknownst to Mom and Dad--and the girl’s e-mails grew bolder, more explicit.

One Sunday night, the girl telephoned, demanding that Gideon explain why he no longer answered her e-mail.

“I can’t talk now,” he said and hung up abruptly. “The Simpsons” were on--”It’s the season premiere!”--and no girl was worth missing his favorite show.

If he was upset, his parents say it didn’t show. He watched TV with his folks on their bed, then his mother hustled him off to his room.

“He was happy . . . playful, typical Gideon,” his mom said, her voice breaking at the memory.

He settled in and patted the side of his bed--the signal for Mom to lie down there for one last chat before lights out. But it was late, and she had work to do; she let him have 15 minutes to read in bed instead.

An hour later, his father noticed a light burning in Gideon’s room and strode over, prepared to scold his son. He found Gideon’s cold, lifeless body slumped over the side of the bathroom sink, his neck cinched with the belt from his terry-cloth robe.

i hope i can see you soon! i think you are really cute, do you think i’m pretty? . . . my friend wants to know why you never call me! . . . I LUV YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH. CALL ME WHEN U GET THIS MESSAGE!!!--From Beach Girl

i love u--GGPunk

How come you can never talk on the phone or on AOL? What time do you go to bed at? . . . Do you relly like me? If U wer dumped or if I broke up wit U would U be tottaly sad and try to get me back? Do U wannta French me? What is the highs cost U would spend on me? from 1-100 how much do U like me? -- Beach Girl

i will love you ok? Im sorry i cant talk it is nothing personal, sorry!--from GGPunk

I LOVE U SOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH CCALL ME SOOOOOOOOOON! I RELLY NEED TO TALK!!!!!!!! IF YOU DON’T CALL I’LL KILL MYSELF!!!!!!!!!----Beach Girl

this is the last from me----GGPunk

*

*

There is much more in the computer record of their son’s monthlong relationship with the girl. (I have dubbed her Beach Girl; it is not her real screen name.) Much of what she wrote is too sexually explicit to be reprinted here. But there is nothing to readily explain what would lead a boy who apparently was happy, busy and full of joy to end his life.

Indeed, two psychiatrists who reviewed the computer dialogue concluded that Gideon probably was intimidated by the girl’s sexually explicit conversations, too overwhelmed to end the relationship and too embarrassed to discuss it with his parents outright.

The doctors believe he was just trying to “act out,” to create a venue in which he would have to tell his parents what was going on. But the drama he staged went tragically awry.

Gideon died after blacking out from the pressure applied to his carotid arteries and then falling forward and choking as the belt tightened around his throat. The coroner ruled his death accidental.

*

It has been 16 months. Gideon’s parents have sold their house and moved to another, unable to bear the crushing weight of memories in the place where their firstborn lived and died.

Again and again, they have replayed moments of the weeks before his death, searching for clues they missed, signs they should have seen.

“We thought we had done our job as parents,” his father says. “He was not a kid who kept to himself. He was always so open, trusting. . . . We thought we’d protected him the best we could.”

They feel compelled now to tell their story, not just to set the record straight but to open the eyes of other parents who may be missing threats their children face.

It’s not the stranger lurking in the chat room, or the graphic pictures of a porno site, his father says. We teach our kids to steer clear of those.

“It’s the so-called peer . . . the sexually aggressive kids who can prey on vulnerable children. That’s what we never expected he’d find.”

And it’s the insidious way the computer becomes one more locked door between parent and child. The way its private nature can embolden even a timid child to cross the line into what had been forbidden terrain. The outlet it provides for children to share with outsiders what used to be part of the family’s domain.

“I used to feel I was on top of what was going on in my kids’ lives,” says my friend Laura, whose two sons are eight years apart--one in college, one in seventh grade. “Now it’s like there’s this parallel universe, and I’m cut off from it because it takes place over the computer.”

When her eldest was 13, telephone calls heralded crushes, and a note passed in English class was the closest kids got to anonymity.

“He used to go in his room and shut the door to talk on the phone,” Laura recalls. “And I’d fold laundry on my bed--which was next to his wall--very quietly, and I could hear bits of his conversations.”

Now her younger son courts from his bedroom computer, e-mails flashing across the screen from girls with names like 2CUTE and dabomb. “I see things [these girls have] written that they wouldn’t dream of saying to a boy on the phone. And I can’t help but wonder, if that’s the stuff he lets me see, how much worse is what I don’t see?”

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.