Judge affirms mother: Her boy wanted to live
Long before Judge Lawrence Moniz made it official yesterday, Lynn Roy knew her 18-year-old son, Conrad, her firstborn child, did not want to end his life … at least not on that fateful July night three years ago.
“If my son really wanted to die in that Kmart parking lot,” she said to me several years ago, “why did he bring the cross I gave him from my First Communion, as well as the one his father received from the pope?”
Lynn Roy sat in a Taunton courtroom yesterday and heard a judge validate her torment — as well as her belief — that in his last desperate moments her son had actually chosen to live.
Judge Moniz told the world yesterday that Conrad Roy’s suicide was actually aided and abetted by a girl sitting 30 miles away with a cellphone in her hand.
Moniz said Michelle Carter, who was 17 at the time, preyed on Roy’s fragile emotional state with a stream of text messages urging him to “do it,” to get back in his Ford F-250 pickup truck that was filling with carbon monoxide — and end his life.
Drawing upon those frantic texts between Carter and Roy, the judge made it clear that the difference between suicide and involuntary manslaughter could be found in that tortured moment when Roy got out of his truck, filled his lungs with fresh air and texted his doubts about dying to Carter.
“He breaks the chain of self-causation by exiting the vehicle,” Moniz told the court.
That was the moment when Lynn Roy’s intuition about her son was officially buttressed by the judge, who was also acting as the jury in this case.
The fact that Conrad Roy had flirted with suicide in the past, or that he may well have tried at some point in the future, did not matter, the judge said.
On that tragic night, in back of a Kmart in Fairhaven, Conrad Roy was basically browbeaten out of his choice to live. He texted back to Carter that he was “freaking” and worried about “my family.”
Judge Moniz didn’t really need to allude to the more twisted parts of this story, all those cloying expressions of sympathy and comfort that Carter sent to Lynn Roy after her son’s death.
Carter gambled that a lone judge might have more sympathy for her plight than a dozen of her fellow citizens. But given the scale, as well as the coldblooded callousness of her texts, it’s hard to think a jury would have returned a different verdict.
Lynn Roy left the courtroom yesterday without saying anything to anyone. Her ex-husband Conrad said his family would begin to “process” a verdict that they had hoped for.
But there were no real winners in Taunton yesterday — only people left to live with a justice that can never erase a tragedy.