Students Caught in Plot to Humiliate Mentally Challenged Girl at Homecoming
Rickie Lee Tanner, a local country singer, was instantly suspicious when his 15-year-old daughter came home and told him she'd been elected Pacific High School's sophomore homecoming queen. She was excited, he said, to ride in a celebratory parade this coming Saturday.
YouTube Pacific High School
"Our daughter has no friends that we have ever been aware of, no one has ever called her or came to visit or even invited her to a birthday party," Tanner wrote later, "so we were fully aware that something was wrong with the nomination when she told us."
What the Tanner family discovered thereafter was a plot as cruel as the movie Carrie, but were the tales they were told an exaggeration?
One thing is clear: A subset of the sophomore student body voted for Tanner's daughter as a joke. In an interview with Fox2, Tonya Tanner said while her daughter performs academically at a sophomore level, she has the emotional maturity of a ten year old. Here's a pretty touching description of her daughter's temperament from Tonya's blog:
Fox2 Tonya Tanner
She has ADHD and social disorder that makes her uncomfortable and awkward participating in basic social graces and early on we realized that making her engage in these normal rituals made her unhappy so we stopped trying to make her be normal and we started letting her be happy. In her mind she feels like everyone is her friend and it is always sunny in her world, so as long as she was smiling and happy who were we to judge her and force her to try to be like others.
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