There is a gaping hole in Shawn Hargis’ bed where, each night, her son Vaughn used to sit alongside his sister Raye and hash out the day.

The close-knit trio started and ended most days that way, piling into the bed to share stories from the day and look ahead to the future.

“We were always talking,” said Shawn.

Sometimes Vaughn chattered so much that his family didn’t dare interrupt him.

“He could be 45 minutes into a story and if you interrupted him, he’d go all the way back to the beginning to start over,” laughed Shawn.

But today, that voice is silent.

On the morning of April 3, 16-year-old Raye was already in mom’s bedroom talking about what that Saturday might hold. But her brother was slow to join the party.

“We kept calling and calling for him,” said Shawn of 14-year-old son Vaughn. “But he’s a teenager and liked to sleep.”

Eventually, when their calls continued to go unanswered, they went into Vaughn’s bedroom to check on him. It was empty.

They began searching the house from top to bottom with no sign of him anywhere.

“Unfortunately, Raye found him,” said Shawn, explaining that her son had hanged himself in the garage.

A memorial service was held for him on April 10. Vaughn was a ninth-grader at Chaska High School.

Why?

In the days following his death, Shawn and Raye have searched for clues and answers as to why Vaughn would have hurt himself.

“He didn’t leave a note, anything,” said Shawn.

“I really, honestly don’t know why,” she continued. “There was no indication.”

Shawn said that her son didn’t exhibit any of the usual symptoms of someone planning to commit suicide. She noted that he had visited with a friend earlier in the day and had been on the phone making plans with another friend for the following week.

A Facebook group started after Vaughn’s death has several entries that imply that Vaughn was bullied at school, but Shawn dismissed the notion that bullying had anything to do with her son’s death although she and Raye both acknowledged that he was teased. They said that Vaughn’s long hair made him the butt of many jokes.

“They called him girl,” recalled Raye. “Sometimes they called him Jessica.”

But neither Shawn nor Raye believed that the barbs about Vaughn’s hair bothered him. “He knew he could cut his hair and blend in,” said Shawn. “He chose not to.”

Shawn explained that Vaughn was growing his hair out to donate to Locks of Love.

“He was on his third round,” she noted, offering that Vaughn was “affected deeply” when she had been diagnosed with cancer years ago. Although she is now cancer-free, he continued to grow his hair to donate.

“He was very unique,” said Shawn. “But he was proud of that fact. He wore it like a badge of honor.”

“He took it as a compliment if he didn’t fit in,” she added.

Fellow classmate Kaleb Olson would agree. “He was a good kid who didn’t care what others thought,” he said in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, this is probably what caused kids to pick on him.”

“It was things like really long hair and World of Warcraft that caused a lot of prejudice and may have classified him as an ‘outcast,’” he continued. “Despite all this, I have no idea why he would have done what he did. He didn’t strike me as a kid who would go to that extreme of a measure. To me he seemed perfectly happy. He had friends that cared about him.”

Hannah Witzig went spent three years in middle school with Vaughn and referered to his death on Facebook as a wake-up call to those who had targeted him.

“I always thought he was very smart, and I remember he always said he’d be fine with more homework,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I think the people that picked on him were the people that couldn’t accept anything out of the norm. He played a ton of video games, he actually liked school, and everyone thought that was outrageously weird. It’s not really, and I think everyone that’s ever known him sees life a little bit differently now because of the influence he had on us.”

Goofy

Shawn and Raye hope that Vaughn’s legacy will remind others that “awesome things come in different packages.”

“Sure, he was a little bit goofy,” said Shawn. “But he was also very intelligent. He always wanted to know how things work.”

Vaughn was an A student with a penchant for foreign languages. He was president of the German Club at Chaska High School and studied Chinese. “He wanted to work in a foreign embassy,” said Shawn.

Vaughn was also active in school theater productions. At home, he played video games and was writing his “Epic Trilogy.”

“He loved to make up stories,” said Shawn.

“You always told him he should write,” said Raye.

Words were a passion for Vaughn, who not only listed Scrabble as his favorite board game, but was also known to read the dictionary.

Raye described her little brother as loving, while remembering the lengths he would go to when it came to gift giving. She relayed one Christmas when she opened an elaborate series of wrapped boxes only to reveal a plastic spork.

“He thought that was just hilarious,” said Shawn.

“He had the biggest heart of anybody I’ve met in my entire life,” she added.

And offering up one of the biggest compliments a big sister can give, Raye said “It was kinda cool to call him my brother.”

-Mollee Francisco, staff writer