‘Suicide by text’ case sweeps the States
The shocking story of student Inyoung You raises a troubling question. Rosa Prince reports from the US…
read the text message from 21-year-old Inyoung You to her boyfriend of 18 months, Alexander Urtula. Then he did.
Now Inyoung is accused of bullying Alexander into committing suicide, after police found evidence on his phone of an abusive relationship – which, they say, allowed the young South Korean woman to take total control of his life.
Over the course of two months, Inyoung, who met Alexander when they were both students at Boston College in the US state of Massachusetts, is said to have sent more than 47,000 messages, including many urging him to die.
Following 22-year-old biology major Alexander’s death in May – on the morning he was due to graduate – Inyoung, who grew up in Washington State, fled to the country of her birth. Prosecutors are expecting to hear this week whether she will return voluntarily and say they will seek her extradition back to the United States to face manslaughter charges if she will not.
The case is the latest to highlight issues of bullying around suicide, including the question – ever more pertinent as we increasingly live our lives online and over apps – of whether those who encourage vulnerable people to take their lives can be held responsible for their deaths if no physical contact is involved.
In the most famous previous case of so-called ‘suicide by text’, Michelle Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2017 after exhorting her friend, Conrad Roy, to take his life when he was 18, and she a year younger. At one point, a court in Taunton, Massachusetts, heard that Conrad had changed his mind and left the fumefilled car where he planned to commit suicide, only to receive a text from Michelle ordering him to return to the vehicle. The case was the subject of a two-part series,
I Love You, Now Die, which aired on Sky Crime last month.
Appealing her conviction, Michelle’s lawyers argued she had a constitutional right to free speech, but this was rejected by a judge who said she could not be excused responsibility just because she used words to bring about Conrad’s death rather than physical force. Now 22 and still in prison, Michelle is currently appealing to the US Supreme Court.
In another high-profile case, Missouri mother-of-one Lori Drew was first convicted of cyberbullying then acquitted on appeal over the 2006 death of a 13-yearold neighbour, Megan Meier, who had fallen out with her daughter, Sarah. Lori created a fake Myspace profile purporting to be a teenage boy, ‘Josh’, who was interested in Megan romantically. In the last message Lori sent, ‘Josh’ wrote to Megan: ‘You are a bad person and everybody hates you… The world would be a better place without you.’ Megan’s response read: ‘You’re the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over.’
While Inyoung’s case has drawn comparison to that of Michelle’s, prosecutors say she is, in fact, more culpable because she was in a long-term relationship with Alexander, whereas Michelle and Conrad met on just a handful of occasions and she began encouraging him to take his life only towards the end. District Attorney Rachael Rollins said: ‘We have quite frankly… the opposite of that. We have a barrage of a complete and utter attack on this man’s very will and conscience and psyche.’
Economics student Inyoung told police she tried to prevent Alexander’s death, tracking his phone to the parking garage where the distraught young man went on the morning of his graduation, having slipped away from his parents who had travelled from their New Jersey home to attend the ceremony. She acknowledges that she was there when he took his life.
At a news conference last month, Ms Rollins said Inyoung’s bullying texts had grown ‘more frequent, more powerful and more demeaning in the days and hours leading up to’ Alexander’s suicide. Classmates of the pair are said by prosecutors to have witnessed ‘unrelenting’ abuse, and it is alleged that as a result, Alexander was in a frail state of mind before his death and that Inyoung was aware.
If she refuses to return to the States, it will fall to the South Korean authorities to decide whether to agree to her extradition – and a trial that might decide if it is really possible to bully someone to death via text message.