Ex-nurse convicted in suicide is out of jail
The former nurse jailed for encouraging a Carleton University student and a British man to kill themselves is out of jail after serving a half-year sentence.
In September, William Melchert-Denkel of Fairbault, Minnesota, admitted to trolling the Internet suicide forums for several years to prey upon people thinking of suicide, including Nadia Kajouji, a 18-year Brampton, Ont., teenager attending university in Ottawa, and Mark Drybough, a 32-year-old from Coventry, England.
Drybough hanged himself in 2005. Kajouji jumped into the frozen Rideau River in early 2008.
Melchert-Denkel was sentenced to three years in prison, but was not required the serve the full sentence so long as he complied with probation conditions that included jail time. The 52-year-old was released Wednesday and will be on probation for the next 10 years.
His trial drew international attention as it wound through the U.S. courts for more than five years. Prosecutors and defence lawyers provided lengthy arguments about what it meant to assist someone over the Internet to commit suicide. The courts eventually ruled that it was a crime to “assist” in someone’s suicide, holding that speech alone can be used to assist or enable a suicide if it is specifically focused on one person and provides that person with the impetus to kill themselves.
The case was particularly prominent in Ottawa, where Kajouji was a first-year student at Carleton University. She has several online chats with Melchert-Dinkel in March 2008, soliciting advice on how to make her would-be suicide look like an accident. She disappeared on March 9, and her body was found in the Rideau River three weeks later.
At the time of Melchert-Denkel’s sentencing, her brother, March Kajouji, expressed the hope that his sister’s death would deter others from similar actions.
“There is no punishment that will be equal to the pain that my family has had from losing Nadia,” he said.