LEXINGTON, S.C. -- A South Carolina mother shared a heartbreaking post on Facebook, saying her 12-year-old son took his own life because he was bullied at school.
By Tuesday night, the post had thousands of shares and comments with condolences pouring in from across the nation.
Kris Huntley, the grieving mother who is not yet ready to talk publicly, wants her son's death to raise awareness about how the consequences of bullying.
“This world lost the brightest and most loving soul while heaven gained the most beautiful angel,” she wrote in the Facebook post.
'My youngest son, Kyler Alan Lucas, at just 12 years old chose to turn his life over to the Lord to ease his extreme pain from bullying at school…My sweet sweet boy was suffering an unbearable pain in silence and I couldn't help him because I didn't know. I couldn't see...why didn't he come to me? Why couldn't I see it?”
The post includes photo after photo of Kyler smiling into the camera.
“The most difficult thing I have to treat are the parents of children who have committed suicide,” Psychiatrist Dr. Michael Rosen said.
Dr. Rosen says childhood suicide and bullying is an epidemic and hopes stories like Kyler's will help parents realize how dire it is.
“They don't realize that their environments going to change and it's not going to be this toxic pulling environment when they get off to college and get up to a work environment,” he explained.
Statistically, bullying occurs in school playgrounds every seven minutes and once every 25 minutes in the classroom.
And if those numbers don't faze you, maybe Kyler's story will.
"If one parent out there sees this and engages in more conversation and realizes, 'gosh, you know with my kid, something's not right,'" Dr. Rosen said, "it could save a life."