People_USA_June_26_2017

DID A TEEN’S TEXTS DRIVE
HER BOYFRIEND TO SUICIDE?
FATAL ROMANCE
Michelle Carter stands trial for involuntary manslaughter for allegedly urging
boyfriend Conrad Roy III to kill himself in a series of shocking texts By JOHNNY DODD
In the final days before 18-year-old Conrad Roy
III decided to end his life on July 12, 2014, by
inhaling deadly carbon monoxide, he was wavering.
But his then 17-year-old girlfriend Michelle
Carter didn’t want to hear any more excuses.
“You’re ready and prepared,” she texted
him. “All you have to do is turn the generator
on and you [will] be free and happy. No more
pushing it off, no more waiting.” After Roy’s
body was found inside his pickup truck in a
Fairhaven, Mass., parking lot, Carter texted
a friend to confess, “I could have stopped it.
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.”
The chilling power of those words—and the influence
they wielded over a teenage boy—are at the
center of a shocking case that could set legal prec-
edent and is being watched closely by scholars of
the law as well as parents of teens nationwide. Are
a teen girl’s texts to her boyfriend protected speech
or were they tantamount to being an accomplice to
suicide? Those questions are being hotly debated
by prosecution and defense attorneys in the Bristol
County juvenile court in Taunton, Mass., where
Carter is on trial for involuntary manslaughter.
Her defense team unsuccessfully tried to get the
case thrown out and are now trying to prove her
innocence to Judge Lawrence Moniz, who will
decide the fate of the now 20-year-old Carter in
lieu of a jury trial. “I think this is going to be a close
case,” says Larry Cunningham, former prosecutor
and vice dean at St. John’s University School
of Law in New York City. “What’s going to make
this case difficult is the fact that the assistance
was verbal rather than physical. The question is,
RIGHT TO LEFT: CHARLES KRUPA/AP; PAT GREENHOUSE/THE BOSTON GLOBE/AP
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June 26, 2017 PEOPLE