Who's to Blame?

By David Hill

Lake Wales, Fla.

On the afternoon of Oct. 16, 1989, Jonathan Morton, an 8th-grade student at McLaughlin Middle School in this central Florida town, was hurrying to catch the bus when he heard a noise coming from the boys' bathroom. He went inside to investigate and found a friend, 13-year-old Shawn Wyke, in the process of tying his football jersey to the rail above one of the stall doors. "I asked him what he was doing," Jonathan testified in a deposition taken in 1993, "and he started arguing with me and stuff, and I kind of, you know, let him have it because I caught on to what he was doing."

Jonathan sensed that Shawn was planning to hang himself from the rail, but at first he couldn't tell if his friend was joking or not. After all, Jonathan and his buddies had played suicide games before. Sometimes, they would cut their wrists with razor blades until they drew blood, making it look like they had tried to do themselves in. "In a way," Jonathan said, "it was kind of cool, but a lot of people would have said, 'That's stupid.' We used to put '666' on our hands and write 'Ozzie' across our knuckles and all...