“High school was bliss for me,” DuBuc said recently. She had earned straight A’s, written for the school newspaper, led Students Against Driving Drunk (she voted to change the name to Students Against Destructive Decisions, she says, to stress that “there are lots of bad decisions that can get you killed”), and performed in “Grease” and “Once Upon a Mattress,” while working part time as a cashier at Mary’s Fabulous Chicken & Fish. Her story, she warned, “is not a nice one, but hopefully it will have a happy ending.”ĭuBuc had grown up in Howell, Michigan, a small town of berry and melon farmers. The essay aired details about her past that she’d long tried to suppress by posting it on her class’s server, where anyone who Googled her name could find it, she thought she might be able to quiet the whispers, the threats, and possibly make it easier to find a job. She knew that people like her had been beaten, bombed, shot at, killed. One morning in 2007, Leah DuBuc, a twenty-two-year-old college student in Kalamazoo, began writing an essay for English class that she hoped would save her life. Parents of both the abused and the accused are seeking to reform policy on juveniles who sexually offend.
