You will have to excuse my ignorance, but I am still unable to find the harrassment that Brandon suffered. Nearest I came is this tidbit:
This is from the kid’s lawyer, so it must be taken with a grain of salt. The original article states that Brandon was harrassed not by King, but by the bullies that wanted to beat up King.
So…can someone point to something concrete about harrassment sufferred by Brandon from King? Because it still looks like Brandon shot King to escape bullying from classmates other than King.
Agreed. The Newsweek piece mentioned that Larry did occasionally aggressively flirt with boys who bullied him in retaliation to the bullying, but that his relationship with Brandon was different.
In the case of Brandon, merely revealing that he had a crush on Brandon caused several boys to taunt Brandon causing him to flip out and murder Larry.
Like I said earlier, the analogous situation would be if some shrimpy nerd publicly asked out a cheerleader, blew some kisses her way and after her friends mercilessly teased her she snapped and shot the kid.
Now, perhaps people would refer to the nerd as “a stalker” and “a bully”, but I doubt it.
The defense attorney’s goal was to turn the situation on it’s head. The facts seem to back up Brandon being among those who bullied King. It’s classic blame the victim strategy.
The prosecution’s original case was to present Brandon as a bully who was idiotically driven to murder King. They were not successful in convincing everyone on the jury of that. It was a bit of an overreach in my opinion but Brandon being the bully in this situation has far more truth to it then claiming King was the one doing the harassing.
No one has presented a truly compelling case King was harassing Brandon. The notion only exists because Brandon’s lawyer said he would try to make that case if it went to trial again.