Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts teen who allegedly urged her boyfriend to commit suicide via text message in 2014, will stand trial for involuntary manslaughter, the state’s highest court ruled.
The Supreme Judicial Court determined that Carter, who was 17 at the time, had preyed upon her boyfriend Conrad Roy III’s insecurities and used a “systematic campaign of coercion” to convince him to “finish what he had started.”
In 2014, Conrad Roy committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide fumes from his car while sitting in a Kmart parking lot. At one point during the incident, Roy reportedly had doubts about going through with the plan, but Carter texted him to “get back in” the car.
This case created major controversy nationally after images of the texts between Roy and Carter were released to the public. The messages showed Carter persuading him to follow through with his “plan” to kill himself and she showed an incredible amount of anger whenever he expressed any kind of doubt.
“You can’t think about it. You just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I don’t get why you aren’t,” Carter wrote.
Carter and Roy initially met in Florida in 2012, while visiting relatives, and developed a romantic relationship that lasted for the next two years eventually leading up to Roy’s death. Though the pair were on and off throughout the course of their relationship, they had reconciled one month before Roy’s death, according to prosecutors. They had not seen each other in person for more than a year at that point in time.
Roy had attempted suicide before and he had a history of mental illness. One day after he was released from a mental institution in Worcester, Massachusetts, he tried to overdose on prescription pills. He was saved that day because he told a girl he had met in treatment what he had done and she immediately called the police.
“I thought you wanted to do this. The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it!” Unlike the girl Roy had met in treatment, Carter had a different approach to his depression. Instead of saving the 18 year old’s life, she decided to urge Roy to take it.