Asher Brown, a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Hamilton Middle School in Houston, shot himself. The morning of his suicide, he came out to his parents. The day before, he was tripped while walking down a staircase at school, then kicked down the remaining stairs when he tried to collect his books, his mother said. His family told the Houston Chronicle that Brown was bullied relentlessly for his small stature, religion, clothes and his homosexuality. There was no suicide note. His stepfather David found his body, lifeless, after coming home from work. "I thought he was laying there reading a book or something," he says. "My son put a gun to his head because he couldn't take what he was hearing and the constant teasing."
Asher Brown's worn-out tennis shoes still sit in the living room of his Cypress-area home while his student progress report — filled with straight A's — rests on the coffee table.

Asher Brown's uncle told a big gathering of mourners and family supporters on Saturday that school bullies "ripped him up and tore him down everyday."
Nothing was done by anyone to protect Asher, himself, or any other target of ridicule at Hamilton.

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together."
"As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake."
— Hannah Arendt