On February 7, a student at Owasso High School in Oklahoma who identified as nonbinary was viciously attacked by three classmates. According to KJRH, the classmates pounded Nex’s head into the floor repeatedly, to the point that Nex could not get to the school nurse’s office without assistance.
The school did not call an ambulance. The assault was not reported to the school resource officer until Nex’s mother told the hospital about it, despite a teacher allegedly stepping in to stop it.
The hospital sent Nex home. The next day, Nex was brought back to the same hospital, where they passed.
“Nex had a light in them that was so big, they had so many dreams. I want their light to keep shining for everyone … That light was so big and bright and beautiful, and I want everyone to remember Nex that way.”
Susan Benedict via The Independent
Image source: Susan Benedict via KJRH
According to The Independent, Nex started being bullied and harassed at the beginning of the 2023 school year and their grandmother did not realize how bad it had gotten over just a few short months.
There are so many questions. Nearly two weeks later:
- it is finally being covered in media outlets beyond Oklahoma, but has yet to be covered by any major national outlets.
- the Owasso Public Schools have not made a statement about Nex.
- the adults who failed Nex have not been held accountable, including those who did nothing about Nex’s harassment over the past seven months.
- the Owasso Board of Education has had no emergency meetings.
- the three perpetrators have not been arrested.
It’s important to note that Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is virulently queerphobic and has the support of the governor. Walters has succeeded in creating hostile school environments statewide, effectively encouraging hostility and violence toward LGBTQ+ students. He has aligned himself with self-described stochastic terrorist1 Chaya Raichaik, whose posts about a teacher in Owasso Public Schools back in 2022 led to bomb threats at the very school where Nex was brutalized.
If, like me, you’ve ever wondered how we got here, this explains it.
- Stochastic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable,’ according to the Max Planck Institute. ↩︎