Neither do I.

I don’t think he is sick as in mentally ill. I think he is a megalomaniac who is criminal.

Jocelyn, how about telling your family to have some respect especially when they’re on Facebook.

How about you telling them that the photos and ideas which your cousin has posted are very disturbing to us, let alone to children.

I remember the case of the teenaged girl – Rachel Bowdler who was found dead in a field, body decomposed, she had been thrown there by the people who were involved with her ‘murder’ namely her boyfriend Jason Decelis who was the last person to be with her and who drugged her at his parents’ residence in Bugibba.

Thankfully he and his mother are locked up.

It is high time for the authorities to take these cases seriously. The mentality that everything is acceptable and everything goes, is plain criminal.

@ H.P. Baxxter

At the schools I was at, there have always been girls who developed a massive crush on a male teacher/ male teachers.

Generally this was not the cooler set who would have had real life socialising experience and healthier targets for their attentions. Whether this was premature is a different consideration.

This didn’t detract from war-paint application by others.

Attractiveness, reality and appropriateness of such male targets were furthest from the equation. Even there, and especially amongst the ones from different backgrounds to the “cooler” set, the spirit was competitive but never based on any real expectation or a lowering of the distance barrier between teacher and child: it was a game amongst girls. The subject of chat during breaks, between and during lessons, mingled with subjects of best friends, hated teachers and made for voluminous diary content which was shared within certain groups.

(Definitely not the subjects for those sneaking off to remote areas for a smoke. These would be dealing with real life scenarios of rejection, projection, elations and jealousies. Rejection had side-effects that were acted out at school – I won’t go into that here.

Then there was the sports crowd that didn’t waste time on petty stuff.)

Teachers never reacted to this attention except to, from time to time, ask the classes in question along the form to get real and call off the war-paint (which wasn’t allowed anyway). In one school the psychology of the matter was properly explained by one such target.

Teenage fantasy properly recognised as such and properly dealt with, not teenage tragedy.

With school rules brought to the attention of classes and parents time and time again.

A distance between teacher and child is not only healthy but necessary for authority and discipline to have effect. I would say the same would hold between Minister for Education and teacher.

One was “sucking-up” or “a sucker” and just ignored and not spoken to for whatever “valid” reason. Or teased in a different plot.

Perhaps such reference points were discarded when the anti-bullying crowd came along. Now one doesn’t dare say such things even if the formative effect held positives and didn’t actually boil down to bullying.

There’s a difference between being nice, remaining silent and being accepting of anything under the sun as long as the package seems trendy and friendly enough.

Perhaps it was part of the quality charter that came with the schools I attended, but as a teenager none of my male teachers were under 40. There was only one exception, who was in his early 30s.

I don’t either.

I don’t believe Lisa Marie killed herself.

“Two young people jumped off of a cliff.”

I observed that you did not add “together”.

Could it be that one was encouraged to jump and the other pretended to jump and jumped from a ‘safer’ height?

It is not that school only that needs to do so.

As a father of schoolchildren who attend both St Michael’s School and Masquerade, where this man has been teaching, I have grave concerns.

What are St Michael’s School and Masquerade waiting for to issue a statement?

Did they even bother to screen this person prior to engaging him? They should have the basic decency and good sense to say something at this stage.

Is nobody in this country ever accountable for anything or to anyone? Time passes by and all is forgotten; that’s the way things work here in Malta.

We shall probably never find out the actual truth as Lisa Marie is not alive to back up her teacher’s story or deny it. Only she and he were on the scene and there were no witnesses.

But that does not change the following.

A girl of 15 was with her teacher, who had kept her out all afternoon and all night, at 4am at Dingli Cliffs. They got there in his car. In other words, an adult, teacher or not (but being a teacher makes it worse), kept a minor out all night against her parents’ wishes. This is against the law. In any situation involving an adult and a minor, the exercise of the minor’s free will cannot be used as justification and the adult always carries full responsibility.

The claim that he was “helping” Lisa Marie, besides being dismissed as a lie by her family, doesn’t make sense. Any adult, still more a teacher, knows that this is not the way to ‘help’ a 15-year-old. There are suitable channels for ‘help’ in the schools anyway.

He took her to Dingli Cliffs at 4am. Because this is an adult-child situation, and not two adults or two children, it is neither legally nor factually correct to say that ‘they went there together’. He took her, in his car. There can be no possible good motive for doing something like that.

From what her friends are writing here, this teacher had been ‘close’ to his pupil for some time and his interest in her was known to her peers.

Regardless of how and why Lisa Marie ended up dead, the fact that a teacher took her to the cliffs at 4am after keeping her away from her family who were looking for her is not a normal and standard situation.

I, for one, do not believe all this talk of suicide. I don’t think she wanted to die and I don’t think she killed herself. At her age, teenagers are afraid to die. They say a lot of things they do not mean, to get attention from the person who admiration they want, and in this case, a bad person took advantage of that.

Let us be more sensitive and think about this tragic loss and hopefully when the right time comes, the teacher will tell the real truth of the story, even if it means that it will condemn him.