Michelle Carter, teen of Massachusetts, is on trial with charges pending against her saying that she provided the means to killing her boyfriend, Conrad Roy. She is being charged with involuntary manslaughter. The court obtained text messages between Carter and Conrad all the way up through the time of his death on July 13th, 2015. Watch the video below to hear more about this tragic, dark, and terribly sickening story.
As you can see after watching the video, there were several areas that provide room for discussion: first being Carter’s horrific way of showing her “love” for Conrad. She states many times throughout the series of text messages between the two teens that she loves him dearly, specifically stating, “I would never leave you. You’re the love of my life, my boyfriend. You are my heart. I’d never leave you” (You can find the full text message history and court case here: full story). You may be asking yourself how you could convince someone you supposedly love to kill themselves, even in the darkest of places. When you’re in a clearheaded state of mind, you can see all of the alternate paths that there are besides suicide. For example, Conrad could have sought professional help, counseling, gone to the hospital, reached out to family and friends who wanted nothing but his best interest at heart, etc. Instead, he could only see darkness, and he confided in a person who encouraged his dark hole to expand. She made him trust her, and worse than that, she made him feel like suicide was the only option. The only smart option. The only reliable and successful option.
You don’t get the full story just by watching the video clip that’s a little over two minutes long, so I encourage you to read through the full court case linked above. The court case uncovers even more text messages between the two teens. I will start out by saying that everything that Michelle Carter did to Conrad Roy was absolutely, 110% messed up and wrong. A mentally stable, well-adjusted seventeen year old girl in no way, shape, or form would convince “the love of her life” to kill himself, stress the urgency of his doing so, and convince him that he was doing not only himself justice, but also that his family and friends would all “get over it,” and “be okay without him.” She convinced Conrad that his mother knew it was coming, and because she never did anything about it, it showed that she was okay with his decision and that he was strong for following through with it.
When Conrad expresses his doubt and fears about his upcoming suicide, Carter forcefully urges him to go through with it. There are text messages that prove this; a conversation was going back and forth between Carter and Conrad the day before his suicide where he was walking his dog or taking his sisters for ice cream. Carter would ask him how he was doing, and when he would respond with the fact that he felt good and was doing ok, Carter immediately jumped to, “Well when are you going to do it?” and “You have to do it soon. You can’t back out now” giving him almost an ultimatum that it was “kill yourself or you’re weak and no good backing out on our deal.” A quote that stuck out to me from their texting conversation when Conrad expressed his fears and second thoughts to Carter was her response to him that wrote, “You’re not joking or bullshitting me about this, right?…I just want to make sure you’re being serious. Like I know you are, but I don’t know. You always say you’re going to do it, but you never do. I just want to make sure tonight is the real thing.” She made it seem like his suicide meant more to her than it did to him, like the details that went into it needed to be met by her standards rather than his comfort level.
The conversations showed that Carter became obsessed with his suicide. That is all she could talk about. Conrad would try to have a normal conversation with her, and she would jump right back to urging him to get it over with right now. Sooner rather than later. She never offered an alternative to his plans, an alternative that could have saved his life. If you read the entire case, you would realize that towards the end Conrad almost made it seem like he had changed his mind for good. He expressed how things were getting better or that he was feeling the slightest bit better, and she would knock down his optimism by backing him into a corner. She actually came right out at one point and said to him that he had already promised her that he would kill himself, so he couldn’t break his promise to her.
On July 13th, 2015, Conrad Roy followed through with his suicide in his truck in the K-Mart parking lot. He suffocated to death on the fumes given off by a generator that Michelle Carter provided him with to use to kill himself. He inhaled too much carbon monoxide given off by the generator. This was no accident, and that is proven in these text messages. Carter explained to him exactly how to go about it so that he would be sure that it would work. He locked himself in his truck, turned on the generator, and started the process of ending his own life. At one point, Conrad got out of the car while Carter was on the phone with him. He told her how he couldn’t do it, that he could feel it working, and that he was so scared. She screamed at him to return to the car and finish what he had started, and Conrad died shortly after.
After she knew he must have been dead, Carter texted his sister and his mother asking if they had any idea where Conrad was. They hadn’t known, and she made it seem to the entire world that she knew nothing about his suicide. Carter expressed to her friend, Samantha, that they had talked about him killing himself but that she never thought he would actually do it. She said that she tried talking him down from ledges and convinced him not to. We have proof, in fact, to show that this was not the case. Carter reached out to his family, went to his wake, and started forming memorial benefits and Facebook groups online to spread the word and “honor her wonderful boyfriend.” She was so into using social media to communicate her “take on his death” that she became obsessed with the attention she was getting. When his friend Tom shared a post that she wrote about the memorial baseball game she was organizing for Conrad, she texted him a message saying, “You’re not trying to take credit for my idea are you? LOL” and almost fought him for the spotlight, in a sense. It was clear by the end of the investigation that her motive for all of this was the attention she knew she would receive after it was all over. One of his friends made a comment to her once asking how many times they had even met in person, leading us to believe that they may not have ever even met face to face.
After all was said and done, the court system seemed to also believe that Carter’s motive was for attention and to make her look like the one who lost something. She made herself out to be the poor girlfriend who would have done anything to save her depressed boyfriend, the one who loved him, the one who was the most devastated by his death, but really, she was the one who more or less provoked it. You can never tell what goes on in a person’s mind, obviously, and no one can say exactly what he was feeling. All we know was that he expressed himself changing his mind about wanting to kill himself and Carter went after him about it saying he “couldn’t break his promise.” In my opinion, I believe Conrad Roy would have a better chance of being alive if it weren’t for Michelle Carter. No one can be sure, but what we can be sure about is that she definitely had something to do with it.
Which brings me to her charges: Michelle Carter was charged with “involuntary manslaughter.” The definition for involuntary manslaughter is: “an unintentional killing that results from recklessness or criminal negligence, or from an unlawful act that is a misdemeanor or low-level felony (such as DUI). The usual distinction from voluntary manslaughter is that involuntary manslaughter (sometimes called “criminally negligent homicide”) is a crime in which the victim’s death is unintended.” To shorten that idea, basically involuntary manslaughter is the killing of a person that must be 1) involuntary and 2) unintentional. Carter had every intention of assisting with the killing of Conrad. She gave him the generator, explained how to make it kill him, urged him to not give up on his wishes of killing himself, told him to get back into the car when he tried to escape his suicide, and then pretended as if she knew nothing about it to gain attention. I believe that charging her with “involuntary manslaughter,” a low-level felony, was the wrong accusation. I believe that she was partially responsible for his death, though not directly, but still very influential over the situation.
Rather than charging Carter directly with involuntary manslaughter, I think the courts need to investigate Carter as if she was a bully. The world bully has a connotation along with it that basically gives off the impression that bullying can only occur between people that hate each other, dislike each other for any reason (being different, being weird, etc.), or can only happen in middle school/high school. The definition of bullying is: using superior strength or influence to intimidate someone, typically to force him or her to do what one wants. This is exactly what Michelle Carter did to Conrad Roy. She knew that he was in an extremely vulnerable, dark place which, in a sense, gave her power over him. One can argue that she didn’t want him to kill himself but wanted to support him through what he wanted, but she made it very clear that this was more or less about her, too. Bullying charges should be made against Carter, and her bullying led to the suicide of Conrad.
You hear stories on the news all the time about middle school and high school students bullying each other to the point of suicide attempts, or even “successful” suicides. After a suicide, people try to find an immediate source of the cause. A lot of the time it’s depression, family issues, self-esteem issues, but most of all you hear about bullying. Bullying comes in all shapes and forms, and it needs to be stopped.
My message to Michelle Carter: I don’t know where we go when we die, but if there are places like Heaven and Hell, you are most definitely going to the darkest part of Hell that there is. You’re a sick human being, and I hope the courts come up with a well-justified punishment for you. Rest in peace Conrad Roy.
