ARVIN, Calif. (KERO) — The alleged bullying at Arvin High School last week has shed light on an issue that has been occurring even before the viral video of the incident caught the community's attention. Back in August, a student at the school killed himself and his mother says the bullying he experienced pushed him to do it. And Monday, community members are coming together to help ensure this doesn’t happen again.
SALT stands for Save a Life Today and that’s what community members at Arvin High School are trying to do with the SALT Walk.
Family and friends of the student who took his own life earlier this year say they wanted something to be done long before last week's viral video of another apparent bullying incident on the campus.
Arturo's mother says her son killed himself back in August due to bullying at Arvin High School. 23ABC spoke to her shortly after his suicide.
"I said 'son, what did you do, my love.' And all I could say to him as a mom was 'what did I do? Tell me. What did I do?' Nothing else could leave my mouth. He said 'nothing, mom. I only want to die.'"
“He told mom, 'I don’t want to live mom. I’m sorry, I’m hurting – they hurt me a lot in school,' added one of Arturo's neighbors. "No children should say that.”
23ABC chose not to provide Arturo's full name or the names of his family members due to safety concerns. The family told 23ABC they have received threats after speaking out against the apparent bullying incident that went viral last week in Arvin.
A neighbor close to the family told 23ABC that Arturo was being bullied because his parents are farmworkers and he didn’t have everything all the other students had.
“He was getting bullied just because he didn’t have name-brand shoes. He didn’t have name-brand clothes. That’s the story that we know.”
And they say they want change to happen so no one has to go through this again.
“I would never think that school is something that is going to hurt my child or this shouldn’t be happening, this shouldn’t be happening at all and we need help," added the neighbor. "We need support. We need to get it out there. We need support. We need the schools to get together and support us that bullying is definitely going to stop.”
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Another Arvin resident says she’s also gone through this at the high school.
“It’s not good. There’s a lot of bullies, and that’s just my own experience. There are more cases. There are more moms that need to talk and tell and report.”
And one of the neighbors says it's now in the hands of the school and they need to put a stop to it.
“We go to the office. They speak. They say they’ll fix the situation. Leave it alone. And then my daughter gets jumped. Then my son gets hit. Then my kid doesn’t want to go to school. Then my kid says that he’s sick because he’s scared to go to school, so it's not one kid, it’s a lot of kids.”
Arturo's mother says she just wants God to save her son.
E-sports coach April Perez has organized a SALT walk before.
“This is our second annual walk that we’ve organized,” said Perez. “We started last year in memory of a team member that has taken his life.”
Perez says a student who had played on the e-sports team for four years died of suicide after graduation.
The school is now coming together to bring awareness to the cause through the SALT Walk, and Ellen Eggert, the founder of SALT, says it’s important for children to know about the dangers of suicide.
“Educating the community in suicide-awareness and our youth. We’ve got to start there,” said Eggert. “Because during covid, the rate of suicide in the general population wend down except for our adolescents, and especially for our adolescents of color, so we got to reach our kids.”
Eggert also says when if someone dies by suicide, there are many factors to consider.
“Suicide is never just one reason,” said Eggert. “Bullying might have just been the icing on the cake, and we would like to say, ‘Oh, it’s bully bully bully…’ and that could have been the last straw for somebody.”
Perez says Monday’s walk and the turnout was a chance to uplift the community.
“It’s bringing a lot of joy, especially right now because our school is experiencing some negative things going on, and just the positivity that everyone brought today, it just really helped lift that dark cloud,” said Perez.
23ABC has continuously reached out to the Kern High School District and Arvin High School about the situation but have not heard back.
