Transgender Teen Commits Suicide After Rejection From Parents

Transgender teen Leelah Alcorn, who was born Josh, died on Dec. 28 after she was struck by a tractor trailer while walking along Interstate 71 in Ohio about four miles from her family's home in Kings Mills.

Carla Wood Alcorn posted on Facebook that her "sixteen-year-old son, Joshua Ryan Alcorn, went home to Heaven after he was hit by a truck."

However, the post was taken down shortly afterwards when a suicide note was auto-posted on Leelah Alcorn's Tumblr account, saying she was committing suicide.

"My death needs to mean something," she wrote in the post, which she scheduled to appear the day after her death.

In the Tumblr post which she queued so that it would be auto-posted, Alcorn described the events leading up to her suicide. She said one major problem for her were her parents who refused to consider that she was a transgender.

Following news of Alcorn's death, her friends and classmates observed one minute of silence in her memory. Later some of them spoke to the media about her. Azalea Laverde said she met Alcorn and they worked together at Kings Island amusement park where she was a caricature artist. Laverde said Alcorn was planning to change her first name from Joshua to Leelah on her 17th birthday.

However, Alcorn's parents did not accept her planned name change and objected to her starting the process of "transitioning" into a female. Alcorn mentioned this in her suicide note, saying that as she grows older, the transition would be more difficult. She said her parents' objection to her plan "broke my heart."

The teen went through a rough patch during the summer. It was at that when Alcorn allegedly decided to commit suicide. Alcorn described that "there was no winning" in this situation and "no happiness."

In her suicide note, Alcorn made a plea to "fix society" even as she noted the high suicide rate among transgenders. Soon afterwards another post appeared on Alcorn's Tumblr account in which she apologized to her brothers and sisters and told her mother and father that "You can't just control other people like that. "