It will take 2 years, but Joe Bell plans to walk across the US as a tribute to his son.
Joe Bell, whose 15-year-old son Jadin committed suicide in February, is taking a 2-year trek from their home state of Oregon to New York City to raise awareness about bullying. Along the way he will be speaking at schools on behalf of Faces for Change, the anti-bullying foundation which was created in Jadin’s memory. Bell told the Huffington Post that his stop in new York will be especially significant, because “Jadin wanted to someday live in New York City.”
Jadin had apparently been the “victim of intense bullying,” which finally drove him to attempt to hang himself on January, 19. He was taken off life support on January, 29, and died 2 weeks later. Bud Hill, who is a close family friend and thought of Jadin as his nephew explained that the teen had been bullied both at school and online because he was gay. He said:
He was different, and they tend to pick on the different ones.If someone was down and out he would walk into a room and say a couple quick words and everybody would just forget about their problems and smile. He just had a gift.
Mr. Bell spoke with HuffPost Live from the road, telling host Abby Huntsman, “[Jadin] didn’t feel good about himself. He didn’t say a whole lot about [being bullied] until towards the end … I wish he would’ve come forward sooner.” The message Bell is hoping to get across with his 2-year cross-country trek is simply this, “We need to stop this bullying — it starts in our households, how we raise our children. We need to educate our school systems on how to deal with it; they don’t know how to deal with the problem.”