Citation

Zavala C. Seton Hall Law Rev. 2016; 47: 297.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Seton Hall University, School of Law)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

On the morning of July 13, 2014, police found an eighteen-year-old dead in his pick-up truck behind a K-Mart in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. It was Conrad Roy, whose mother had reported him missing after he failed to come home the night before. He left his mother's house the previous night, around 6:30 p.m., telling her that he would be visiting a friend. Instead, the young man drove to the Fairhaven K-Mart and filled the passenger cabin of his truck with carbon monoxide using a combustion engine. By the time the police found Conrad the next morning, he was dead. According to the district attorney's office, police searched Conrad's cell phone in the course of their investigation and found that he had been text-messaging Michelle Carter at the time of his death.


At the time of Conrad's suicide, Michelle Carter was a seventeen-year- old high school student. The two initiated a romantic relationship that was primarily carried on through online and cell phone communication, with very little in-person contact. Initially, Michelle admitted to police that she was talking to Conrad at the time he committed suicide but claimed she did not know what he was doing. She said that when the phone call ended, she "did not think much of it." Police were able to recover conversations between them from Conrad's cell phone, despite Michelle having asked Conrad to delete them. Conrad's text messages revealed a very different picture. For at least a week prior to his suicide, Conrad spoke to Michelle about his plans to commit suicide. Michelle's own text messages with a friend revealed that she had a forty-seven minute telephone conversation with Conrad on the night he committed suicide.


On February 5, 2015, a grand jury indicted Michelle on charges of involuntary manslaughter for Conrad's suicide. According to prosecutors, Michelle: "pressured [Conrad] to go through with suicide for almost a week before he carried out the act...."

Language: en