Friends say that the 11-year-old Scottish boy found dead near his primary school was the target of bullies.
"Other boys used to pick on Rory and bully him because he wouldn't fight back, but he also had some friends who stood by him," Pat Callum, 11, told the Glasgow Daily Record.
Police discovered Rory's body on Sunday after a search involving hundreds of officers. He was last seen Thursday morning when his mother, Michelle, dropped him off at Meldrum Primary School in Livingston, a town midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The death was being treated as suspicious.
Another friend, Jamie Platt, 10, told the newspaper that someone saw Rory crying on Tuesday, the day the new school term began. He said that Rory "would just walk away" when a boy called him a name like "low-life."
No one knew that the boy was missing until his grandfather went to the school Thursday afternoon to pick him up.
Family members say that Rory had also been upset by the collapse of his parents' marriage and by the recent death of his grandmother.
© Copyright 2005 by United Press International
