05/09/2026
Diagnosed at three. Beaten weeks after graduation.
In late June 2015, a group of teenagers in New Baden, Illinois, got word to Gavin Joseph that they wanted to be his friends. Joseph had graduated from Wesclin High a few weeks earlier. He has Asperger's syndrome and ADHD, diagnosed when he was three, and he went to meet them. What was waiting was a circle of strangers who choked and punched him until, as they put it, he had learned his lesson. Some of them had been saying it was weird that he went to things alone and watched people, and creepy that he wanted to be friends with people he did not know.
He came away with a mild concussion, a bruised esophagus, a fractured nose tip and a hematoma in one eye. Nothing permanent.
Joseph did not press charges. What he asked for instead: that their community service be disability-related, that each of them write a paper on Asperger's syndrome, and that they sit down with their own families and watch a twenty-minute statement he recorded, so they would hear the evening from where he had stood. His mother, Cortnie Stone, put it on Facebook, and it went around the world within a week.