Buffalo, New York's Kenmore East High School is the epicenter of controversy Tuesday, where 11 members of their girls basketball team have been suspended for beginning their games with a pregame chant that incorporated the N-word.

“They huddled up in a circle and go ‘1-2-3,’ and say, [the N-word, spelled out,]” Tyra Batts, a 15-year-old sophomore who’s the only African-American player on the squad this season, told WIVB-TV in Buffalo. “It makes me feel sick to my stomach, and weird and awkward that I was in the locker room with them when they said it.”

Batts detailed the exchanges with her teammates over the chant to The Buffalo News.

Police have opened a criminal investigation into the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, an openly gay student in Buffalo, New York who killed himself after a year of being bullied both online and at school.

The Amherst Police Department's Special Victims Unit says it will determine whether to charge some students with harassment, cyber-harassment or hate crimes. Police said three students in particular might have been involved.

Although Jamey had just started his freshman year at Williamsville North High School, the bullying began while he was a student at Heim Middle School. (Both Amherst and Williamsville are just outside Buffalo.)

In a shocking and sad story, Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old boy from Buffalo, New York committed suicide Sunday, just months after posting a widely-viewed video on YouTube in which he reassured other young people that “it gets better” in wake of his own past of being bullied at school because of his sexuality.

"People would just keep sending me hate, telling me that gay people go to hell," Jamey, who identified himself as bisexual, said in the video titled “It Gets Better” posted on May 4. "It was a constant taunting ... the same people over and over."