Twisted teen suicide tale takes new turn
For a young woman who’s had zero luck with judges over the last couple of years, Michelle Carter made a rather bold move yesterday.
But then I suppose it takes a woman with a certain amount of brass to urge a boy battling depression — a boy who tried once before to end his life, and a boy who was smitten with her — to go ahead and kill himself.
In the summer of 2014, Michelle Carter sent the following group of texts to Conrad Roy III at the very moment the 18-year-old Mattapoisett kid struggled over whether or not to end his life.
Carter: “I thought you wanted to do this. This time is right and you’re ready. You just need to do it… You just need to do it like you did the last time. And not think about it and just do it, babe.”
At that moment, Conrad Roy was wondering if he should remain in the cab of his pickup truck as it filled with exhaust fumes.
Roy: “I do want to,” he texts back to Carter, “but I’m freaking for my family, I guess. I don’t know.”
Carter: “Conrad, I told you I’ll take care of them. Everyone will take care of them to make sure they won’t be alone and people will help them get through it. You just have to do it now like you said. Are you going to do it now?” Tragically, he did. Roy had recently graduated high school and managed to pass all the requirements necessary to earn a tugboat captain’s license. He was the third generation in a family of tugboat operators.
On a blustery winter’s day several years ago, shortly after Michelle Carter was formally charged with involuntary manslaughter, Conrad’s mother, Lynn, recalled how the girl who stole her son’s heart seemed to hover around her in those summer days after her son’s suicide.
“All that summer,” Lynn told me, “Michelle was sending Conrad messages, telling him she loved him. So, why didn’t she die with him?”
After failing to get her case tossed first in juvenile court and then before the judges of the Supreme Judicial Court, Carter placed her future in the hands of Judge Lawrence Moniz in a Taunton courtroom.
There was no shortage of tears yesterday when Carter’s lawyer announced that his client would waive her right to a jury.
The question Michelle Carter has to ask herself is: Does she feel lucky? So far two courts and several judges have determined her conduct to be egregious enough to warrant a trial.
If Judge Moniz finds her guilty, she will be left to wonder if folks in street clothes, rather than one in a robe, might have been more receptive to tears.