Carter text: ‘His death is my fault ...’
Testimony rivets courtroom
TAUNTON — Michelle Carter admitted to a friend that she could have prevented her high school boyfriend’s suicide, but instead told him get back in a truck filling with deadly carbon monoxide fumes, according to a text message presented yesterday as evidence in her manslaughter trial.
“Sam his death is my fault like honestly I could have stopped him I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I (expletive) told him to get back in,” Carter texted her friend Samantha Boardman on Sept. 14, 2014.
The text, shown in Taunton District Court yesterday, referred to the death of Conrad Roy III, who was found dead in his truck on July 13, 2014. Roy used a generator and a water pump to force carbon monoxide into his truck as he sat in a Fairhaven Kmart parking lot, according to authorities.
Carter is accused of coaxing Roy, then 18, to commit suicide and — when he started to have second thoughts — to finish the job.
“I knew he would do it all over the next day and I couldn’t have him live the way he was living anymore,” a 17-year-old Carter texted Boardman. “I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t let him.”
After Boardman read the text aloud in court, Bristol prosecutor Katie Rayburn allowed a chilling silence to fall over the third-floor courtroom.
In a text a month earlier to her friend Lexi Eblan, Carter admitted that she had been listening to Roy as he cried out in pain and died.
“I have all these flashback thoughts of when I was talking to him on the phone when he killed himself,” Carter’s text, presented as evidence, says. “I just think about hearing his cries and I just panic and have like panic attack from it, every time I see a car alone in a parking lot i get freaking out and anxious.”
After yesterday’s hearing, Carter, her defense team and Bristol prosecutors toured the parking lot where Roy died. Rayburn asked Judge Lawrence Moniz — who will render a verdict in the bench trial — to notice the parking spot where a lifeless Roy was found in a black Ford truck.
Flowers, seashells and a baseball adorn a small memorial for Roy just a few parking spots away from where he died. After Moniz, Carter and the lawyers left the scene, a woman walked over to the memorial, bent down and crossed herself.
Earlier yesterday in court, prosecutors showed a late July text to Boardman, in which Carter appeared to admit that her correspondences with Roy were potentially damning.
“Sam they read my messages with him, I’m done,” Carter texted. “His family will hate me and I could go to jail.”
Investigators who probed Roy’s tragic death are expected to testify today.