Sticks and Stones by Emily Bazelon

Author:Emily Bazelon [Bazelon, Emily]
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64400-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

Flannery finished high school by taking night classes at a community college, glad to go for days without seeing anyone she knew from high school. She spoke up, though, when a teacher who didn’t know her history brought up the South Hadley Six one day. “I told the class they didn’t know the whole story and they probably never would,” she said. To help pay her probation and school fees, she worked during the day at a real estate office in Holyoke. The town is only a few miles from South Hadley, but it’s bigger, and for Flannery, it felt like freedom. She hadn’t told her mother yet, but she was looking for an apartment with a friend. She was nineteen and ready to be on her own.

By this point, Principal Dan Smith and Superintendent Gus Sayer had retired from the South Hadley school district, pensions intact. Elizabeth Scheibel had been named one of the Bostonians of the Year by the Boston Globe, for her role in the Prince case; when she stepped down a year after Phoebe’s death, she said she had no regrets about prosecuting the six South Hadley students.

She appeared on CNN nearly a year later, long after all the criminal cases had been resolved, with her deputy Elizabeth Dunphy Farris and Anne O’Brien. Piers Morgan, the interviewer, once again repeated the likely falsehood that the “bullies” had posted “done” on Facebook after Phoebe’s death and Anne said that they’d posted “she got what she deserved.” Morgan called the teenagers’ behavior “wicked” and “depraved.” Anne said she wanted to clarify that prison terms were “never on the cards”—which was odd, given the many years of prison Flannery and the others had faced. If the DA’s office never intended to ask for such a punishment, why had it brought such serious charges? Asked a related question, about why some of the kids had been prosecuted as adults, Farris said this “sent a message.” She continued, “It needed to be put out in the public.” O’Brien’s and Farris’ statements made it sound as if the DA had used the teenagers to make a point.

If the prosecutors emerged unscathed, the kids were struggling. At seventeen, Sharon was pregnant. Ashley and Austin had both been charged with drunk driving. Flannery was worried about Austin: his mother had told him he couldn’t live at home anymore, so he was crashing with friends when he could. He’d stopped going to school, and his job at a packing plant meant he spent long days in a giant meat freezer. “There was no real closure for anyone,” Flannery said. “Were we guilty? Or was the prosecution unfair? You couldn’t really tell. So it’s over but it’s not really over.”

Flannery’s neighbor was still yelling “slut” and “whore” at her in public—in fact, she was facing a harassment charge. Flannery appreciated the irony of being on the other side of a criminal proceeding. “The DA’s office calls and asks how they can help me,” she said. But she was more interested in focusing on her future than her past.

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