British teen hangs himself after he was bullied for being good looking

A teenager committed suicide after he was bullied for being too good looking, said his parents following an investigation.

Fifteen-year-old Brandon Rayat hanged himself in his bedroom after being harassed by other teenagers who called him a ‘paedophile’, sent him messages from a social media account in the name of Jimmy Savile, and threatened to rape his mother.



Brandon went through physical and mental abuse, including “online torture”, every day for more than a year until he was unable to attend school. He refused to leave his home in order to avoid seeing his bullies, it was said.

His mother, Mina, had left her job as a hairdresser in order to support her son.

"The bullies got in his head and sucked the life out of him, it just wasn't Brandon. Brandon was a handsome boy and a lot of girls took a shine to him as he got older. I think the bullies were jealous of that. He even shaved his hair off so he could be like them - he just wanted to be accepted," she said.

"He wanted to go to university and become a doctor. He had his whole life planned out, but these boys were relentless. He used to love school, but within a few weeks of the bullying starting, he was asking us to move to another country so he would never see them again," she added.

Brandon’s parents realised the bullying was serious when the teen suffered a breakdown.

Mina said, "Some of his friends told us that he got a lot of attention from girls at school who liked him and that went against him. He had started telling me he didn't want to go school and that he didn't like the people there, but I didn't realise how bad thing were until he had the breakdown. He came running into the house one day and he was screaming, 'I want to die, I want to die'. I had never seen him like this before so I made a GP appointment."



Brandon then attended 11 appointments at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). Mental health professionals refused to hospitalise him despite pleas by his parents. The experts claimed hospitalisation would only increase his panic level.

After investigation into his death last month, a coroner concluded that the schoolboy from Leicester had committed suicide and the opportunities had been missed by mental health services to evaluate him face-to-face after he confessed an attempt to kill himself to a psychiatrist 11 days prior to his death.

Since the incident, CAMHS has formed an outreach crisis team so that mental health experts are able to treat children in their homes.

This story originally appeared in The Telegraph.