A national LGBTQ youth nonprofit said crisis calls from Oklahoma more than tripled in the weeks after transgender student Nex Benedict died there on Feb. 8.
Lance Preston, founder of the Indianapolis-based Rainbow Youth Project, a suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, said the group’s crisis hotline for LGBTQ young people received 1,097 contacts, including calls and online messages, from Oklahoma in February — an increase of more than 200% from its monthly average of 350 contacts.
The group received just under 1,000 of those contacts after Feb. 16, when Nex’s death began to receive widespread media attention. Of the 1,097 contacts, 87% reported incidents of bullying in Oklahoma schools.
“The high volume of contacts underscores the pressing need for intervention and support services — support services that are far too often unavailable, especially in rural areas of the country,” Preston said during a news conference Thursday hosted by the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization.
In an email following the news conference, Preston told NBC News that he believes the spike in contacts is partially due to an increase in awareness of the group and its crisis services.
Nex — who was transgender and used he and they pronouns, according to friends and family — died a day after a fight at Owasso High School. The Owasso Police Department released a series of videos that show the hours following the fight, including body camera video from a police officer’s interview with Nex, in which he described how three students “jumped” him after he threw water on them because they were bullying him and his friend for the way that they dressed.
On Feb. 21, police released preliminary information from an autopsy report that they said shows Nex’s death was not the result of trauma. However, days later, a spokesperson for the department clarified that the fight hasn’t been ruled out as having contributed to or…
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