Teen Leaps to His Death After Sex Video Accusations

Corey Walgren was a popular hockey player and fisherman with good grades, a close-knit family, and plans to apply to college soon. And yet, on Jan. 11, soon after an ordinary text exchange with his mom about his class schedule for the following year, the 16-year-old high school junior jumped off a parking garage roof to his death. The tragedy took place less than three hours after Walgren was called into a meeting with a campus dean and the school police officer at Illinois' Naperville North High School and threatened with being placed on the sex offender registry for allegedly possessing and possibly sharing "child pornography." The accusations were related to a video police found on Walgren's phone—so dark that nothing could be made out—of a consensual sexual encounter with a 16-year-old classmate.

"I think they wanted to scare him straight," Walgren's mother, Maureen, tells the Chicago Tribune. "Instead, they scared him to death." Walgren's parents weren't contacted until almost 20 minutes into authorities' conversation with the teen, and once Walgren's mother said she'd come to the school, Walgren was left alone in the school office to wait for her. Instead, he left, walking less than a mile away to the five-story parking garage from which he fell to his death. Now his family is speaking out—and planning to sue the school district and the police department—with the hope that changes will be made to the way they handle incidents involving minors. "There has to be a change in their policy and their procedures," Maureen Walgren says. "Corey's death cannot go by with no meaning at all." Click for the Tribune's full story. (More suicide stories.)