Tyler Long: Did bullying lead Georgia teen to suicide?

Karen Zatkulak
News Channel 9
Chatsworth, Georgia — A family wants answers after they say bullying lead to their son’s death. Seventeen year old Tyler Long committed suicide last month.

“He was my best friend, my role model, I looked to him for advice,” Troy Long, Tyler’s fourteen-year-old brother, says.

Troy says his older brother meant the world to his family. In sixth grade Tyler was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome – a form of autism that creates social disorder, but Tyler still managed to enjoy sports, video games, and his family.

“When Tyler smiled he just had that look like he was the best man around,” Teryn Long, Tyler’s sister, says.

But that smile died on October 17.

“I felt shocked, disbelief, it was like a part of me had vanished,” Troy says.

“I got out of bed and I went in Tyler’s room where David was and I saw him hanging there and I knew he had had enough,” Tina Long, Troy’s mother, says.

Tina tells us that she knew the seventeen-year-old had been bullied in the past and she had tried to warn Murray County High School administrators, but says things only got worse. She says the bullying got so bad that Tyler simply stopped talking about it until the day he died.

“There’s a loss that I can never explain and I don’t know how long it will be or how long it will be with us but I continue to see one image of Tyler and that’s not the image I remember Tyler the most by,” David Long, Tyler’s Father, says. Full story.