Text messages reveal a dark truth.
By Raif Karerat
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A teenage girl in Massachusetts, Michelle Carter, pressured her boyfriend to go through with suicide for almost a week before he carried out the act, according to prosecutors.
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 also knew that if anyone discovered how she aided her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to commit suicide, she would go to jail, reported The Washington Post. She asked Roy in a text message to delete her messages before he carried out the suicide last summer. Nevertheless, investigators found them.
Carter, who was 17 at the time of Roy’s death, now faces manslaughter charges in juvenile court in Massachusetts.
Her attorney argues 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.”
Text messages recovered by police, suggest that by 2014, Carter had gotten tired of Roy’s rambling about suicide and she wanted him to go through with it — immediately.
In one text she allegedly said to Roy, “You said you were gonna do it. I don’t get like why you aren’t.” According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Roy responded: “I don’t get it either.”.
“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.”
A few days after Roy’s death, Carter told a friend via text message that she blamed herself.
“Like, honestly I could have stopped it,” Carter texted Samantha months later. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car” because the carbon monoxide was working, she said. She added that she “told him to get back in.”
Roy’s body was found by police on the morning of July 13.
The trial is ongoing and set to resume on Oct. 2.