Isaiah Climons was just 12 years old when he took his own life. His aunt, Linnette Sepulveda, found his body.

"When the doctor, police and nurse came in," she said in Spanish, "they told us the boy had passed away."

A report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows 22 Massachusetts children died of abuse and neglect in 2014, at least 10 of whom had been known to state social workers. The report also highlights an ongoing and disturbing trend of youth and teen suicides in the state and around the country.

After Climons’s death, his classmates in Leominster gathered for a vigil, and the story going around was that he’d been bullied. But Climons’s cousin, Jasmin Sepulveda, said that’s not the full story.

“It wasn’t just bullying in school," she said. "It came from home as well.”

Numerous police reports show he’d been beaten with a belt and verbally abused in a home where the refrigerator was locked and he didn’t have proper bedding. The state Department of Children and Families was aware of Climons’s situation, but weren’t able to prevent his death.

Climons didn’t keep his plans to commit suicide to himself—he posted them on Instagram.

“There were two pictures that were basically telling everybody what he was going to do," she said. "And everybody just missed it.”

Some of Climons’s classmates saw that Instagram post and told school officials. Leominster School Superintendent James Jolicoeur says they reached out to Climons’s mother, but she never responded. The next day, Climons took his own life.

“A lot of the families are really disconnected from these kids," Jolicoeur said. "So it’s hard to rely on the family to be a catalyst in making the situation better.”

Jolicoeur said the tragedy caused the school district to take action.

“We stepped up our attention to any of the tips that come in from students," he said. "We sharpened up our district crisis management plan so that we were equipped to be able to deal with an incident like this again.”

And yet, the results of a public-records request by NECIR show a school principal in the town later received an email from another student threatening suicide, and the principal said he didn’t know the best way to handle it. He waited until the next day to respond, and thankfully, the student was OK.

Alex Crosby, a suicide prevention expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says school's staff need to be taught what to do in these cases.

“You don’t train those people to be a psychotherapist," Crosby said. "But you train them to know what to do when you see someone in trouble. Do you know that there are resources? Do you know there’s a local crisis hotline or a school counselor, if it’s somebody in a school? Do you know how to get them to some help?”

CDC numbers show 21 kids committed suicide in Massachusetts in 2014, representing a steady increase from 11 in 2007. Among children ages 10 to 17 in the state, suicide is now the third-leading cause of death.

A state law passed in 2014 includes a provision that requires all licensed public school personnel to be offered two hours of suicide awareness prevention training every three years.

“The problem was that there was no funding attached to it,” said Alan Holmlund, director of the state Department of Public Health's suicide prevention program. He said the state has no idea how many schools are training teachers and staff, but they’d like to know which ones are not offering it.

Massachusetts actually has one of the lowest suicide rates in the country and spends more than almost any other state on suicide prevention. Last year, $4 million from the state went to the Massachusetts Coalition for Suicide Prevention. Its website offers help to people who are considering suicide or know someone who is.

And yet, more and more people—young and old—keep committing suicide in the state each year.

“We don’t know exactly how many suicides that we are avoiding by the programming that we have," Holmlund said. "That’s the difficulty with prevention services."

Even in a state with among the fewest suicides, the numbers are alarming. Nearly 600 people in Massachusetts committed suicide in 2014.

In a survey of Massachusetts public school kids a year earlier, 12 percent said they had seriously considered suicide in the past year—most of those kids actually made a plan. Six percent of kids made an attempt.