Adolescent goaded boyfriend to commit suicide

‘It’s now or never': Texts reveal teen’s efforts to pressure boyfriend into suicide

Michelle Carter knew that if anyone found her text messages to her boyfriend Conrad Roy III, she might go to jail.

“[If the police] read my messages with him I’m done. His family will hate me and I can go to jail,” Carter texted a friend after her 18-year-old boyfriend used a gas-powered water pump to commit suicide in the parking lot of a K-Mart.

Carter had asked Roy in a text message to delete her messages before he carried out the suicide last summer, but investigators found them anyway.

According to prosecutors, Carter pressured her boyfriend to go through with suicide for almost a week before he carried out the act. She counseled him to overcome his fears; researched methods of committing suicide painlessly; and lied to police, his family and her friends about his whereabouts during the act itself and after, prosecutors said.

Carter, who was 17 at the time of Roy’s death, now faces manslaughter charges in juvenile court in Massachusetts.

Her attorney argues, however, that the charges should be dropped because Carter’s messages are protected by free speech. According to attorney Joseph P. Cataldo, Carter was “brainwashed” into supporting Roy’s plan for suicide.

“He ultimately persuaded a young, impressionable girl,” Caldato told reporters, according to South Coast Today. “Eventually he gets her to endorse his plan.”

But in an indictment, prosecutors outlined in nauseating detail the extent of Carter’s alleged role in helping Roy overcome his doubts about suicide.

For more than a week in July 2014, Carter and Roy exchanged hundreds of messages in which Carter insisted that Roy would be better off dead.

“You’re finally going to be happy in heaven. No more pain,” she told him in one message. “It’s okay to be scared and it’s normal. I mean, you’re about to die.”

...

“You always say you’re gonna do it, but you never do,” Carter complained. “I just want to make sure tonight is the real thing.”

Another time, she texted: “You can’t keep pushing it off, though. That’s all you keep doing.”

Carter was insistent, even when Roy steered the topic to other things:


ROY: How was your day?

CARTER: When are you doing it?

Roy said he was having a good day, but Carter wasn’t satisfied.


CARTER: Really?

ROY: Yes.

CARTER: That’s great. What did you do?

ROY: Ended up going to work for a little bit and then just looked stuff up.

CARTER: When are you gonna do it? Stop ignoring the question???

...

After his death, Carter became a self-proclaimed advocate for mental health.

She organized a fundraising tournament in Roy’s memory and posted on Facebook and Twitter about her attempts to save her boyfriend’s life.

“Even though I could not save my boyfriend’s life, I want to put myself out here to try to save as many other lives as possible,” she wrote on Facebook.

more...



It's hard to imagine the level of psychopathy that this adolescent exhibits, the sheer cynicism.

I'm left dumbfounded.