Teen charged w/ encouraging man to kill himself

Posted at 11:56 PM, Sep 09, 2015
and last updated 2015-09-09 23:56:16-04



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"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," Michelle Carter allegedly wrote to Conrad Roy III the day he parked his truck outside a Fairhaven Kmart and killed himself through carbon monoxide poisoning.






Carter's lawyer, Joseph Cataldo, said her texts amount to speech protected by the First Amendment. He said it's clear from the exchanges that Roy had made up his mind to take his own life and Carter, now 18, did not cause his death.


"He had thought this out. He wanted to take his own life. It's sad, but it's not manslaughter."


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"He did not have the signs of someone who was considering that," Maki said.

Carter and Roy met about two years earlier while each was visiting relatives in Florida. They kept in touch, mostly through texts and email, upon returning to Massachusetts. They lived about 50 miles apart and hadn't seen each other for about a year before Roy died.


While discussing the plan, Carter appears to taunt Roy. "But I bet you're gonna be like 'oh, it didn't work because I didn't tape the tube right or something like that," she wrote. "I bet you're gonna say an excuse like that ... you seem to always have an excuse."




"Well it's too late I already gave up," Roy responded.


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"Causation is going to be a vital part of this case," said Daniel Medwed, a Northeastern University law professor. "Can the prosecution prove that she caused him to kill himself in this way? Would he have done it anyway?"

Prosecutors point to a text Carter sent to a friend after Roy's death.

"...his death is my fault like honestly I could have stopped him 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 ... because I knew he would do it all over again the next day and I couldn't have him live the way he was living anymore I couldn't do it I wouldn't let him," Carter wrote.


"He was coming out of his depression," Roy said. "We saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and she just blew that tunnel up. She shut the light off."


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