I am sorry it has taken me so long to get back here to reply, but I was working my way up to finals for this college quarter and had to put this on the back burner for a while.

poj, your code was really helpful, but in the end, to get it to work, I moved the $sql_del and sth_del down into the for loop. Using strict also caused problems for me, so I just left it out for now. I was able to test this via a table I set up on WampServer, so I should be okay to execute this on my actual server now

Thank you all for all of your help and tips!