Sex abuse, not 'American Pie': Giovanni Kelly's legacy lives on and will help other victims

Giovanni Kelly's little brother found his suicide notes under the teenager's bed.

Each was addressed to a loved one. Another was addressed to the woman who was in prison for sexually abusing Giovanni for months.

Giovanni killed himself on Dec. 30, 2022. In the notes he hid under his bed before leaving home for the last time, he made it clear that he did it because Jenna Beckner, a friend's mother, manipulated him into having sex with her when he was 15, and ruined his life.

"It's still not really real to me," Giovanni's mother, Sarah Kelly, said recently during an interview at Renfrew Park in Washington Township, not far from where Beckner abused her son.

Giovanni, called just "Gio" or "Vanni" by friends and loved ones, was a happy-go-lucky kid before Beckner entered his life in 2020.

"He was the funniest person I knew. He always made me laugh," said Giovanni's 12-year-old brother, Micah.

Micah said he could go on and on about how awesome his brother was, how good of a person he was. He admired practically everything about him, especially his taste in clothes.

Giovanni and Landon Jordan were best friends ever since they first met around age 5 playing baseball, an activity that would bond them forever.

“It was an instant connection type thing when we were younger and it just stayed that way throughout our whole lives, really,” said the 18-year-old, a 2023 graduate of Waynesboro Area Senior High School.

Jordan said he and Giovanni would spend hours together talking about everything — school, friends, girls, baseball, skateboarding, life in general. Each supported the other while doing his own thing, such as Jordan going to Giovanni's football games when he played on the Waynesboro Stallions youth team.

"He was the most caring about just every person. It doesn't matter if you knew him, if you didn't know him, he cared about everyone and wanted the best for everyone," Jordan said.

Giovanni's aunt, Judith Campbell, talked about the time the family went to a Baltimore Orioles game when Giovanni was 6. He saw a homeless man near the stadium and wanted someone to help him.

"He was so upset and was like, 'He needs help! He needs help! Somebody needs to come help him!' That’s just who Giovanni was, he had the biggest heart."

Giovanni's legacy will live on through 'Gio's Room'

Giovanni extended his caring attitude to Beckner when the time came for prosecutors to hammer out a plea deal.

Beckner pleaded guilty to two felonies, statutory sexual assault and corruption of minors, court records show. She was sentenced in March 2022 to one to three years in prison, plus three years of probation upon her release.

She also will be a registered sex offender for the rest of her life.

Beckner is to be released from SCI-Muncy on Aug. 16, according to a letter the Office of Victim Advocates sent to the Kelly family on Aug. 10. She will have served just under 17 months in prison. She will be on parole until March 2025.

Her attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

Dave Rush, a former detective for the Franklin County District Attorney's Office, said the charges Beckner was convicted of generally come with a prison sentence of four to 12 years.

In his eyes, Giovanni gave her a gift.

"He met with the prosecutor and said, 'Look, I want her to be punished for what she did but I don't want to punish others … If she goes off to jail, she is in jail but she has children and they will be affected,'" Rush said. "That is a very mature way of thinking for a 15-year-old."

While Giovanni “truly” wanted Beckner to have her life back so that her family would not suffer, his family does not feel her being released after a year in prison is justice, Kelly said.

“I feel like there is no greater impact on someone’s life than the loss of their life, so she should have served all of the time,” she said.

His father Darren Kelly and, at the family’s request, Rush spoke to the parole board on Giovanni’s behalf. Giovanni's mom and Rush both said they were confident the board was affected by Giovanni’s story, and they couldn’t believe Beckner won parole.

Beckner's case was one of the last cases Rush saw through to the end while a detective with the DA's office. After 27 years there and with Pennsylvania State Police, he now works at Children's Advocacy Centers of Pennsylvania in a role focused on developing more child advocacy centers in Pennsylvania and providing training.

That Giovanni's case inspired change at Franklin County's own child advocacy center, of which Rush is an integral part, is a cosmic coincidence.

Earlier this year, the Over the Rainbow Child Advocacy Center moved from its original home on South Main Street in Chambersburg to a building on North Second Street, within walking distance of Franklin County's court complex.

"Gio's Room" will be a waiting room for teenagers who are there to share their sexual abuse stories with a forensic interviewer.

Giovanni came up with the idea on the space while reflecting on his experience at the child advocacy center.

“He said, ‘I really felt childish when I was here and it felt like a place for babies and kids, and I didn’t think I should be here.’ He said we should have a teen waiting room," Rush said.

The story of Giovanni's abuse

Nothing about Giovanni’s behavior jumped out to his parents in the months during which they later learned he was being abused.

“There were changes, but he was also 15 so there were always changes,” Kelly said. “Hard to say what was 15, what was mental health, and what was the situation.”

Jordan said they hadn’t been hanging out or talking as much, but he was flabbergasted when Giovanni called him up one day and let spill out everything he had been going through.

“But after that things got, I feel like, a little bit better because we started talking about it and trying to get out of it,” Jordan said. “I mean it’s still really, it’s not enough. I can’t do everything. Something like that you can’t do much to help, like to completely help. He just was still in a lot of pain for a really long time. I didn’t know exactly what I needed to do, but I tried my best.”

In an interview at the child advocacy center, which Rush watched and described in the affidavit of probable cause, Giovanni said Beckner added him on Snapchat shortly after they met in person through one of his friends. For a couple of weeks she would send messages as if she was coming on to him, and eventually she asked to hang out.

Giovanni said they had sex for the first time in Beckner’s basement after they started watching a movie. They had sex about three times between September or October and mid-December of 2020.

“He said it made him feel like he didn’t have a choice,” the affidavit states. “He felt he didn’t have a choice in what happened in his life anymore. It made him feel like he couldn’t go anywhere.”

Giovani told Beckner he did not want to see her anymore — “by phone, text, in person, every way possible,” according to the affidavit. He said she would accuse him of playing her and would call him names, then get upset “like a child,” and he would feel bad and apologize.

“He said it felt like a trick, like a mind game. She would act like she didn’t do anything wrong,” the affidavit continues.

Investigators reviewed screenshots Giovanni took of text messages between himself and Beckner. In response to him telling her he didn’t want to be contacted anymore, she said: “Go ahead and tell your mommy and daddy. See wtf happens.”

Kelly said Giovanni told her and his dad about the abuse in early February 2021 after receiving text messages that made him uneasy.

“She tried to instill fear in him. Her (relative) was also our landlord so she tried to make threats on our situation. But that was coincidence that he was our landlord. There were a lot of levels to it.”

According to Rush, Giovanni’s first interview at the child advocacy center was focused mainly on the actions that took place, not necessarily the psychological aspects. So a few weeks later, Giovanni told his dad he had more he wanted to say and a second interview was arranged.

He seemed like a different person the second time around, Rush said.

“When he came back he elaborated more but he talked about the mental things. There was a pregnancy scare. She told him, ‘Man if my husband knew what you and I were doing he’d kill you,’ (and) ‘I’ll commit suicide if we end the relationship.’ A lot of guilt to lay on 15-year-old kid.”

Giovanni seemed 'the epitome of resilience' before suicide

Giovanni gave a victim impact statement at Beckner's sentencing in which he described what she did to him and how it affected him. (There is no transcript because something went wrong with the audio recording, Rush said when this reporter asked if he knew why it was not on file at the courthouse, as others usually are.)

After watching Giovanni evolve from closed-off and scared in his first interview at the child advocacy center to bravely sharing his story in a room of adults at Beckner's sentencing, Rush was confident that Giovanni was going to be OK and would move past his nightmare.

"I've seen some resilience, but he really was the epitome of resilience, of 'This isn't going to hold me down. I'm handling it and I'm going to be OK.'"

Giovanni went missing on Dec. 29.

Kelly said it didn't seem unordinary at first when he didn't arrive home for dinner that day. As a 17-year-old new driver, he was known to go do his own thing.

The day before was the last time Jordan saw Giovanni. The best friends and Jordan's girlfriend sat around talking at Jordan's house, like any other time.

Hours passed while Giovanni was missing and no one heard from him. Friends and family drove all around looking for his orange car, Kelly said, but before long there was nowhere else to look.

Describing himself as an "eternal optimist," Rush said he would not believe the worst. Something about Giovanni had a hold on him.

"I can't truly explain why he impacted and influenced me. But he did and he did in a big way," he said.

Even though it was right before New Year's, Rush contacted Washington Township Police Department and asked officers to promote that Giovanni was missing on their popular Facebook page. He thought the teenager would for sure turn up.

Rush described a conversation he had with Giovanni’s dad, whom he said didn’t believe this was merely a matter of his son just hiding out.

Giovanni was found dead just inside neighboring Adams County on New Year’s Eve. It was determined he'd killed himself the day before.

Giovanni's parents found out when police came to their house. Family and friends gathered there soon after.

“It was just the worst for everybody," Kelly said.

Asked how he felt when he learned about Giovanni's death, Rush took a long pause.

“I was angry, I was very saddened that this got to be bigger than what he could handle," he said. "He’s left a mark with me that I refuse to stop advocating for anybody that’s ever experienced anything that he did.”

Micah and his dad were going through Giovanni's room a few days later when he came across some sheets of notebook paper stuffed under the mattress.

They quickly realized what they were looking at, seeing each paper was a note addressed to a different person. Everyone at the house gathered and read their notes together.

"So there were a couple of days where we didn’t have the notes, we didn’t have any answers. And those days feel like months," Kelly said. "Then as soon as the notes were found I think we all felt … well, I'll just speak for me, I felt different. I felt a peace knowing why."

Jordan said the clarity the note provided and knowing Giovanni set out to ensure his loved ones wouldn't wonder made him feel a little better.

"It was kind of out of the blue, he was just gone. It was super, super gut-wrenching. Just no clue, nothing," Jordan said. "Finally, at least there was something."

Giovanni had struggled with his mental health before Beckner entered his life, Kelly said. He was in a long-term mental health treatment plan, even before the sexual abuse.

To help her son get the help he needed, Kelly took a night shift at work starting when he was 13 so she could drive him to appointments.

"He was the person I spent the most time with. My life will never be the same," she said.

Kelly is glad, in some sense of the word, that she knows why her son felt he had to leave this world. It could have been different.

Giovanni revealed to his mother in December 2020, two years before his death, that he was contemplating suicide. This was right at the tail end of the sexual abuse he was enduring, several months before threatening text messages pushed him to tell his parents about what Beckner had been doing.

"He could have died without us knowing that the abuse had even taken place," Kelly said. "I just want other youths that might be the victim of abuse to know that they should tell people. It's important to tell and get help and not to, that suicide isn’t the answer."

Giovanni's case bucks statistics on child sex abuse

One in 10 children is sexually abused before they turn 18, according to the National Children's Advocacy Center.

It is far more common for girls to be victims than boys. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), 82% of victims under 18 are girls.

Female offenders are rare, too, being involved in only 9% of cases, according to RAINN.

"People would be outraged" if Giovanni and Beckner's genders were reversed, if he was a teen girl and she was a middle-aged man, Rush said.

Once word of his abuse got out, Giovanni struggled with people not taking his experience seriously. Campbell, his aunt, said he dealt with male peers and even adult men congratulating him for sleeping with a woman his mom's age.

"There's an 'American Pie' kind of misunderstanding for male victims that it's something they should want and it's just not fair or accurate," Campbell said, referencing the late-1990s teen sex comedy. "So it probably happens more in this community, it probably happens more everywhere, and making male victims more comfortable speaking up is really important."

While it could be a mistake for a child to not stay alert for "stranger danger," they are probably more at risk around someone familiar. About 93% of perpetrators are known to their victims, according to RAINN.

Kelly said she did not deem Beckner a threat at first, given she was a mother of a child Giovanni's age and they knew of each other from being in the same nursing school class.

Kelly described an encounter soon after Giovanni met Beckner, when she allegedly told him that if she was in high school, he would be her type. It was only a red flag in retrospect.

"If you think something is a red flag you should listen to your gut because that itself is even a strange thing to say to a kid. It could be explained until realizing the truth of what was actually happening."

Campbell said she hopes Giovanni's story helps parents to see that teenagers can be victimized just like younger children. She said parents should talk to their teens about the manipulation and grooming that may take place before anything physical happens.

"It's still abuse from the beginning," she said.

How to get help

If you are struggling with mental health or are contemplating suicide, dial 988, the National Mental Health Crisis and Suicide Prevention Hotline.

Amber South can be reached at asouth@publicopinionnews.com.

This article originally appeared on Chambersburg Public Opinion: Sex abuse led Pa. teen to suicide, but his legacy will help victims