The late Kenneth Sutter
Harley Branham, 21, a manager at the Dairy Queen in Fayette, Missouri, has been charged with second degree felony manslaughter following the suicide of 17-year-old Kenneth Suttner, whom she supervised. At an inquest called by the Howard County coroner, witnesses testified that Branham mistreated the teen. She made Suttner lie on the restaurant floor as he cleaned it by hand, and once threw a cheeseburger at him. Other witnesses said the boy also had been bullied for years at his school, where students mocked his weight and a speech impediment.
The coroner’s jury blamed both the Dairy Queen and the Glasgow School District for failures in training and prevention of harassment, concluding that Branham “was the principal in the cause of death,” and also that Dairy Queen negligently failed to properly train employees about harassment prevention and resolution, according to the inquest’s verdict form. Jurors also found that the Glasgow Public School system was negligent in failing to prevent his bullying.
All of those factors, the inquest concluded, caused the boy “to take his own life.”
Suttner shot himself on December 21, 2015.
Howard County Coroner Frank Flaspohler explained the inquest and the verdict, saying, “I felt there was bullying going on and things weren’t getting corrected. Hopefully this makes the school pay attention to what’s going on. And it’s not just in that school. We all need to wake up and say this exists and we need to take care of it.”
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