‘Sick game of girl who urged boyfriend to commit suicide’
A WOMAN charged with using text messages to encourage her boyfriend to kill himself played a “sick game” with another person’s life, a prosecutor has said.
In dozens of text messages and telephone calls, Michelle Carter, then 17, repeatedly urged Conrad Roy III, 18, to kill himself, prosecutor Maryclare Flynn said in opening statements at Ms Carter’s trial for involuntary manslaughter.
She faces up to 20 years in prison. Mr Roy was sitting in his pickup van in a store car park in July 2014 as the vehicle filled with carbon monoxide. After he got out of the van, Ms Carter told him to “get back in”, Ms Flynn said at the trial before a judge – with no jury – in a juvenile court in Taunton, Massachusetts. She said Ms Carter, who did not call authorities or Mr Roy’s parents as he died, wanted the sympathy and attention that came with being the “grieving girlfriend”.
Joseph Cataldo, defending, said Mr Roy was depressed after his parents’ divorce, was physically and verbally abused by family members and had long thought of suicide, even researching suicide methods online.
Mr Cataldo claimed Ms Carter, now 20, urged him to get help.
The couple met in Florida in 2012 but had only seen each other in person a handful of times. They communicated mostly through text messages and telephone calls.
When Mr Roy suggested they should be like Romeo and Juliet, the lovers who killed themselves in the Shakespeare play, Ms Carter said she did not want them to die, Mr Cataldo said.
“Conrad Roy was on this path to take his own life for years,” he said. “It was Conrad Roy’s idea to take his own life. It was not Michelle Carter’s idea.”