Sad new details have emerged in the past week about Irish schoolgirl Phoebe Prince, who committed suicide in South Hadley, Massachusetts after being bullied in January.

The online magazine Slate carried a major article last week, essentially calling for the bullies to be exonerated because Phoebe had clearly exhibited previous mental stress and attempted suicide before.

Slate's slant was blatant and deeply unfair to the Prince family who lost their daughter in the most tragic circumstances imaginable.

The article also failed to point the finger at the school authorities themselves who must share a major portion of the blame.

The real villains in the Phoebe Prince suicide are not just be the kids at South Hadley High School who bullied her, but the counselors who failed to act despite knowing her history, even the morning before she did the terrible act.

We now know that Phoebe had a history of cutting herself when at school in Ireland, had a previous attempt at suicide and was clearly deeply depressed. The bullying at school was certainly taking its toll and she had been cutting herself again.

Her mother, Anne O'Brien, had given an extensive history of Phoebe's problems to school administrators.

Yet Eileen Kakley, one of the school assistance team members who helped troubled kids, admitted to police that Phoebe's name had never surfaced when they discussed at-risk kids that fall or in the New Year term.

South Hadley Principal Daniel Smith also admitted this and told Slate that "individual support was being provided to Phoebe by the counselor and the nurse. It was happening at that level."

But that same counselor and nurse failed Phoebe too. On the morning that she died, Phoebe, distraught by the bullying, had cut herself again, jagged cuts that she was not able to conceal.

Counselor Sally Watson Menkel interviewed her but seemed to take no action other than telling Phoebe's mother about "our medical and mental concerns."

Here is a young kid about to commit suicide that day, and the one person who is trained to spot such imminent behavior completely misses the warning signs.

As Robert King, a professor of child psychiatry at Yale told Slate, "Did the counselor ask if Phoebe was thinking of hurting herself? Did she ask to talk to Phoebe's therapist?"

The answer, incredibly, seems to be no.

A young girl with a history of mental illness, a previous suicide attempt and a well-known pattern of being bullied by as many as six people, was allowed to walk away to her death. That is the ultimate indictment of South Hadley High School and the administration there.

There are no winners in the Phoebe Prince case, nor will there ever be.

But nonetheless the need to know who was culpable and how lessons could be learned for other schools and kids at risk is a very real one.

If the lessons from the death of Phoebe help any other school or child at risk then it will not be a life lost utterly in vain.

Her family and the still traumatized community in South Hadley need to know the truth. Calling a spade a spade and acknowledging failures on all sides would be a good place to start.