http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... e0415.html

Suicide raises rhetoric in immigration debate

Greg Risling
Associated Press
Apr. 15, 2006 12:00 AM

ONTARIO, Calif. - Hours after eighth-grader Anthony Soltero was called to the vice principal's office, he took his stepfather's rifle and killed himself.

Now, Anthony is being portrayed as a martyr in the immigration debate.

The boy's family says he killed himself because he had been threatened with jail for walking out of school to protest proposed changes to immigration law.

School officials deny he took part in the protests and deny he was threatened with anything more than missing a dance or field trip. They say he simply cut class.

Anthony, 14, ducked out of DeAnza Middle School on March 28, the same day thousands of students across Southern California took part in walkouts and protest marches. He killed himself at home two days later, leaving a suicide note in which he blamed the run-in with the vice principal, a family lawyer said.

On the Internet, several blogs have portrayed Anthony as a martyr. The word was used by one civil rights activist aligned with his family. The headline on one posting pronounced the suicide "First death from walkouts."

Officials with the Ontario-Montclair School District about 45 miles east of Los Angeles expressed sympathy for Anthony's family but adamantly defended the vice principal.

The school district said four students left school March 28. Superintendent Sharon McGehee has said that interviews with students and faculty members show the boy and the other students never marched with protesters.

Two days later, the vice principal told Anthony and three other students that for their truancy they could choose whether to miss a field trip or a dance, McGehee said.

That was not what Anthony told his mother by phone moments before shooting himself, nor what he wrote in a suicide note, according to lawyers for the family.

Attorney Samuel Paz asserted that interviews with the other students support the mother's recollection: that Anthony was told he could be jailed for three years and his parents could be fined.

In his suicide note, the boy named the vice principal and "expresses his fear and worry about what would happen to him," Paz said.