11 Year Old Girl Commits Suicide After Discovering Non-Existence of Santa Claus
http://www.kymonews.com/news/national/11-year-old-girl-commits-suicide-santa-claus/article5633560/

Janet Paisley, 11, committed suicide yesterday afternoon after having discovered that the jolly old elf Santa Claus had been entirely fictional. In an interview with her mother, we learned that Janet began having doubts about Santa Claus a few years earlier, and would purposely misbehave around her family to see if she would in fact receive coal for her transgressions. “We knew she had been a hellion, fighting with her sister and cousins, but what parent could bring themselves to ruin a kid’s Christmas? We still bought her the gifts, and she seemed happy enough to receive them. How could we know?” said mother Anne Paisley.

Janet then began an existential spiral into nihilistic despair. Her journal revealed that she had begun to question the legitimacy of morality. One passage reads, “If I’m good I get presents, and if I’m bad I get presents. My parents buy them for me. There’s no list of the naughty, no list of the nice. My actions have no consequence. If I did actually get coal, it wouldn’t be because some transcendent judge with absolute knowledge of nice and naughty deemed me unworthy of gifts, but merely because my parents were upset that I broke Grandma’s vase and lied about it.”

This surprisingly articulate 11 year old, fuelled by her despair at the lie she had been living, began misbehaving in school, and, despite measures by the school’s staff, seemed impervious to traditional methods of discipline. “We would put Janet in detention for hours upon hours after school, and she would continue to misbehave. I even asked her if it bothered her to be all alone, and she told me that she’s always alone. In her mind, there is only her consciousness, and that doesn’t change whether there are people in the room or not,” said Arthur Schumacher, the school’s Vice Principal.

Right before Janet’s unfortunate end, she had been sitting quietly on a swing in the playground. Janet then got up, and calmly walked over to her classmate Ahmed Nasab, 11, and stabbed him in the side once with a pencil, then stabbed him four more times in quick succession. Ahmed was rushed to the hospital, and is currently in stable condition. When asked why she did it, Janet replied, “Just to see.”

Then yesterday, just days after the incident on the playground, Janet was found by her mother in their bathtub with her wrists slit. Beside her was a note that read, “I no longer desire presents. Coal doesn’t bother me. All I want for Christmas is the truth, and that is the one thing that does not exist. There is no Santa Claus. There is only nothingness.”

Memorial services will be held in St. James Church, Thursday November 29th, at 3:00pm.