Richardson High School - the school where Jeremy took his life

I stopped by Richardson High School in December 2003 and snapped some photos. They were re-doing the entrance with a modern look, however this is how it has looked since being built and how it looked when Jeremy attended Richardson High School.

News Article about Jeremy - Two Articles appeared the next day, both follow

(names shown in bold have photos after article)

Lisa Moore , 16, said she knew Jeremy from the in-school suspension program. "He and I would pass notes back and forth and he would talk about life and stuff," she said. She said Jeremy wanted to discuss the boy she was dating and also mentioned that he was having trouble with one of his teachers. He signed all of his notes, "Write back." But on Monday he wrote, "Later days." "I didn't know what to make of it," she said. "But I never thought this would happen." However, Sean Forrester , 17, remembered Jeremy as friendly with no outward signs of turmoil. "He never looked like he had anything wrong with him. He always made a joke over everything," Sean said. Jeremy was the son of Joseph R. Delle of Richardson, with whom he lived, and Wanda Crane. The couple divorced in 1979, according to Dallas County court records. Mr. Delle could not be reached for comment. Ms. Crane, through a spokesman, declined to comment. Tuesday's shooting was the first known teen suicide in a Richardson school. It was the first by a Richardson student since 1988, when student suicides prompted the creation of the crisis intervention program in May that year. Three Richardson students committed suicide during the first half of 1988. They included a sixth-grader and two sophomores at J. J. Pearce High School. One of the sophomores hanged himself from a tree behind Mohawk Elementary School during a weekend. In 1985, a 17-year-old Arlington student shot himself in front of four fellow students in the drama classroom at Arlington High School. Earlier, and outbreak of teen suicides in Plano, where eight youths killed themselves in 1983 and 1984, helped focus national attention on the plight of suicidal teen-agers. Students and counselors agreed that the shock of Jeremy's public demise would have a lingering effect on the Richardson students, particularly the witnesses. "They are going to go through a ton of sadness, anxiety and fear," said Sheryl Pender, a counselor with Willow Park Hospital in Plano and former director of the Suicide and Crisis Center in Dallas. Staff writer Jeffrey Weiss contributed to this report.

The second article in the Dallas Morning News that day:

Click on the image to the right to see a clear, readable version of the article:

Crisis teams respond quickly to teen’s suicide

By Annette Nevins

Staff Write for the Dallas Morning News

RICHARDSON- A new peer counseling group at Richardson High School went to the aid of classmates Tuesday when a student killed himself during an English class.

It was the first big challenge for the 20-member group, which was specially trained last spring to help fellow students handle crisis situations. The team was one of several counseling groups that began work within minutes after school district administrators learned of the suicide.

Danny Glick, vice president of the peer counseling group, was among those who went to the classroom after sophomore Jeremy Wade Delle shot himself.

To his surprise, the room was not filled with hysteria. “It was catatonic. No emotion,” he said.

Danny, 17, talked with one boy who had seen the shooting from the front row of the classroom. He couldn’t tell me how he felt,” he said. “He just kept telling me in detail what happened. Over and over.”

Danny said some of the students he talked with knew that Jeremy had problems and expressed regret that they had not approached him.

“Everybody I talked to said the ultimate same thing: They wish they could have said something to him before he did it,” he said. (SS Note - would have been difficult with Jeremy locked away in ISS for a month or two, where you are not allowed to talk to other students - similar to solitary.)

Pat Olney, director of a separate Crisis Intervention Team, said peer counseling is a valuable tool because students usually talk more freely with other students.

The district’s intervention team, which was formed just two years ago in the aftermath of other student suicides, includes psychologists, counselors, principals, the superintendent and other administrators. Also on the scene Tuesday was a campus-based intervention team of administrators.

“The first thing we have to do is to help the students acknowledge their feelings about what they just experienced,” Ms. Olney said.

“Adolescents are more fragile, and it’s often more difficult for them to deal with something like this,” she said. “Their feelings range from fear and terror and sorrow to anger that it happened, and anger that it happened at school.”

Shortly after Tuesday’s shooting, she said, the crisis teams met as a group with the students and teacher who witnessed the shooting and offered individual counseling.

The team notified the students’ parents and wrote a note to each of the school’s teachers with information about the incident. Another memo was sent to each classroom to be read to the students.

The crisis teams plan to remain on campus for as long as needed. Ms. Olney said. Another community crisis team made up of doctors, police officers and clergy has been alerted and is standing by to help if needed, she said.

Teen suicides are increasing across the country, Ms. Olney said. Many school districts have formed similar intervention teams.

In Richardson, a committee of parents, students, board members, medical professionals and community leaders began work in 1988 to form the district’s crisis-team following at least three student suicides.

The Plano school district also set up intervention programs when seven teen-agers killed themselves during the 1983-84 school year. (SS Note – Plano is due north of RHS.)

But suicide intervention does not come without criticism. Recently, Columbia University researchers wrote in a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association that teen suicide prevention programs in schools actually may stir up depressed feelings rather than help youths who have tried to kill themselves.

Ms. Olney, who knows of the report, said that study refers to one-time lectures on suicide and not the ongoing intervention programs such as Richardson’s, which involves follow-up visits and student monitoring.

A photo of two students appeared with this article with the subheading: “Richardson High School students Chris Ray and Tim Cullum talk about sophomore Jeremy Wade Delle.” (Unfortunately the quality of the photo was too poor to reproduce for this page.)

Staff writer Jeffery Weiss contributed to this report.

Richardson High School Yearbook Photos (including photos of those from the above article)

Jeremy's photo is not in the yearbook, as he committed suicide before the year book was produced. He is not even mentioned in the "those not pictured for the year" section, however, the following two items are present in the RHS 1991 yearbook. It was nice that Brandy, Melanie and someone else remembered Jeremy with the following memorials. Shown below are his teacher, principal and several of the students who spoke in the news article.

Jeremy's Teacher in his English class where he committed suicide, and his school principal. Jerry Bishop was the head principal I believe, but Joe Roseborough was the principal responsible for Jeremy. I met Joe Roseborough in 1990 and only found out at the first of 2005 that he was Jeremy's principal at RHS. I had produced an innovative catalog addressing multimedia educational materials for drug prevention, suicide prevention and other teen issues and Joe Roseborough had come to my offices to discuss promoting the catalog during his talks at other schools.

Students who spoke in the news article above:

Lisa Moore and Sean Forrester, above, and Howard Fellman, below: