Teenage years are stressful when a person experiences many significant changes in their thoughts, bodies, and feelings.
Many of these changes come with intense fear, confusion, doubts, and questions no one seems to know the answers to.
Inevitably this difficult phase affects a person’s ability to develop decision-making and problem-solving skills as an adult.
Without guidance or support from parents, friends, teachers, or other grown-ups, a teenager can feel a consuming pressure to succeed so overwhelmingly that it undermines good morale.
For some teenagers, developmental changes can be too embarrassing or hard to overcome to the point where suicide may begin to look like a solution.Β
Just like in the case of Jeremy Wade Delle, a Richardson High School student who shot himself in a classroom on January 8, 1991, it is not always easy to pinpoint the underlying problem of teenage suicide.
The single “Jeremy,” made famous by Pearl Jam, tried to tell a story about it, although those closest to Jeremy know the song is far from accurate. The real Jeremy Delle had his own story to tell.
10 /10 A Gun In His Mouth
In the morning of January 8, 1991, Joseph Delle called home two hours after leaving for work to make sure that his son Jeremy was awake for school.
On the phone, he told Jeremy that it was going to be a cold day. Jeremy did dress warmly; he wore a gray sweatshirt over his T-shirt, thermal underwear under his jeans, and two pairs of white socks under leather boots.
In the classroom, that morning at 9:40 a.m., no one but Jeremy himself knew that he was about to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.
9 /10 Divorced Parents
After nine years of marriage, Joseph and Wanda Delle β Jeremy’s parents β finalized their divorce in July 1979. Jeremy was a 5-year-old back then.
Wanda became the managing conservator of Jeremy and his sister. Joseph was legally required to pay child support and non-insured medical expenses.
Joseph’s second marriage ended in July 1983. Wanda remarried in April 1984. In November the same year, the father remarried, but it only lasted several years.
After living with his mother, sister, and stepfather, Jeremy moved in with his father around March 1990 and enrolled in Richardson High School.