Suicide teen said father ‘beats everyone, and my mother, and me’

Stylianos Constantinou, the 15-year-old boy who ended his life by suicide in 2019, had told his first-grade teacher that his father “beats everyone, and my mother, and the sheep, and me”, the Nicosia district court heard on Monday, as the trial of 11 people regarding the circumstances surrounding his death continued.

A total of 11 people – Constantinou’s parents and nine employees of the social welfare services department – are standing trial. His first-grade teacher took the stand as a prosecution witness on Monday.

She read a testimony she had given to criminal investigators in 2020, and explained that Stylianos had a personal learning support assistant throughout the school year during which she was his teacher, between 2010 and 2011, and that he had “behavioural problems”.

She said Stylianos would “push desks, causing injuries to other pupils”, and “had a tendency to run away”, while also regularly doing press-ups in class, in his own words, “to get strong and beat them up”.

She said that he “seemed to admire his father, but at the same time feared and hated him because of his behaviour towards his mother”, and once told her that his father “beats everyone, and my mother, and the sheep, and me”.

When he arrived in the first grade, she said, she had been informed that in nursery school, Stylianos “could not follow the class schedule” and “exhibited aggressive behaviour”.

She said that during the year in which she taught him, he “had limited vocabulary and general knowledge” and “did not have the expected access to books and educational materials for his age”.

Wore the same clothes for several days in a row

Despite this, she said on the first day of the school year, he was “a very polite child, very collected, thin, with very good behaviour”, but that in the weeks that followed, “marks appeared on his face and hands”, while he often wore the same clothes for several days in a row, eventually “giving off a bad odour”.

She went on to say that there were “also problems with his diet. He usually did not bring food to school, and his learning support assistant often brought it for him herself”.

She said the social welfare services department had been informed of “the problems which were observed, including issues of cleanliness, nutrition and the child’s reports of violence at home”.

On the matter of marks appearing on Constantinou’s body she said she had “seen abrasions twice or thrice”, and that “in one case, Stylinanos appeared with his head cut open and thick blood on his head”.

She said that he had reported that he had “hit a tree”, and that the incident was reported to the social welfare services department.

Teacher saw cigarette burn mark on his body

On another occasion, she said, she had seen a cigarette burn on his body and “reported it immediately”, but was told that “teachers were to look for fresh marks”, as “only if the marks were recent could the social welfare services department proceed with the case”.

Later, she made reference to a conference held with Stylianos’ parents in March 2011, during which those present discussed “the family’s living conditions and issues of Stylianos’ behaviour”, among other things.

During that meeting, she said, Stylianos’ father was “offended by what was discussed, went home, took his shotgun, and returned to the school”, where he allegedly threatened to “cut [the teacher’s] legs off”.

She said that after that meeting and other similar meetings, Stylianos had returned to school saying that his parents had told him that “teachers were talking badly about him” and that they wanted to “take him away from his family”.

She said that after this, the school has asked Stylianos’ parents not to discuss the content of those meetings with him, as “we were there to help”.

Regarding his academic performance, she said that by the Easter holidays, he had learned to add up to ten and mental arithmetic up to five, while his classmates were “progressing to multiplication and division”.

Father slaughtered a lamb ‘to set an example’

She added that Stylianos had said in school that “wild dogs often come to the farm and attack the sheep”, and that he had “a particular fondness for one of the lambs, which his father allegedly slaughtered ‘to set an example’”.

On this matter, she said that Stylianos had “cried and apologised” to his father, but that his father had nevertheless slaughtered it.

The teacher said that Stylianos’ mother had initially told her that his father was violent towards both her and him, telling the court that “his mother had said that her husband had beaten her one day because she had not cooked”.

She said that after a certain point, she “no longer reported incidences of violence” and came across as “vague”.

Towards the end of her testimony, she said that during playtimes at school, Stylianos “often preferred to sit alone and talk to his learning support assistant” rather than play with the other children.

When he was encouraged to play with the other children, she said, he reported that he preferred to rest, and seemed to have no energy.

“He was a closed character as a child, but I think he was carried away by his difficulties and thoughts. I think it was not the reality of his character,” she said.

The trial will continue on Friday.

Lottides: social workers showed ‘utter criminal negligence’

Constantinou was found dead at his family farm on September 5, 2019.

The government empowered ombudswoman Maria Stylianou Lottides to launch an investigation into the matter in September that year.

In her report, she found that both the police and the social welfare services department had failed to recognise the psychological violence directed at Constantinou by his father, as well as a pattern of violent behaviour towards his mother.

She said the social workers assigned to the case had showed “utter criminal negligence” and that as such, they may bear criminal responsibility for his death, while also saying that police officers had violated their own regulations and failed to inform the relevant government department about incidences of domestic violence.

After Stylianos’ death, his two younger siblings were removed from the family home.