It was supposed to be a normal Saturday in Indiana. Ten-year-old Sammy Teusch had just watched his older brother’s soccer game, tucked beside his parents in the stands. But as they were leaving, he quietly pointed at a boy on the field. “That’s him,” he whispered.
The boy Sammy had identified was one of several who had tormented him for months. Just a week earlier, that same child had shoved Sammy into a trash can at school while others stood around laughing. The bullying hadn’t started there, though—it had been building for two years.
Sammy, with his sweet face and earnest heart, had become a target. First, they mocked his glasses and his teeth. Then, it turned physical. At Greenfield Intermediate School, the abuse escalated, and his parents say the system that should have protected him didn’t act. They reached out to the school multiple times. Sammy himself begged his teachers for help. But according to his father, he was ignored.
One incident on the school bus left Sammy physically hurt—and punished. Afterward, he told his dad, “It’s okay, Daddy. They’re not listening to me.
The Teusch family, desperate to shield their son, did what they could. They ordered him new glasses—$525 frames he had picked out himself, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the teasing would stop. But the glasses arrived two days too late.
