National Post

‘If I have to go back to that school, I’ll kill myself’
Pam Wilson sat Wednesday at her spacious home in a suburb north of Toronto, next to her grand piano, surrounded by her cats and photographs of her grandson Mitchell Wilson, 11, who spent his summers at her cottage and called her “Mimi.”

Earlier in the day she had attended the Durham Regional Courthouse, in Oshawa, for the trial of the 12-year-old accused of bullying her grandson, knocking the boy’s face into the sidewalk, and stealing an iPhone that the boy carried.

But her grandson, whom she called “Mitch,” was not at the court hearing. He took his own life three weeks ago, Sept. 6. On Labour Day, the eve of the first day of school, he said goodnight to his father, Craig Wilson, and his stepmother, at their home in Pickering, east of Toronto, and then lay down in his bed with a plastic bag over his head. His father found him in the morning.

The bullying that her grandson suffered at his school, Westcreek Public School in Pickering, led the boy to lose his will to live, his grandmother said, breaking her silence on the case on Wednesday.

“He said to me, ‘Mimi, my biggest issue is that I can’t protect myself, and if a man cannot protect himself, then he is not a man,’” recalled Ms. Wilson.

“At the cottage in July, he said, ‘If I have to go back to that school, I’ll kill myself.’” (Photo: Peter J. Thompson/National Post)