On July 13, 2014, 18-year-old Conrad Roy committed suicide in a K-Mart parking lot in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. The teenager, who grew up in the nearby city of Mattapoisett, used a portable water pump and generator to fill his truck with poisonous carbon monoxide. At one point, he changed his mind, got out of the vehicle and texted his long-distance girlfriend, 17-year-old Michelle Carter. She persuaded him to get back in the truck, where he died from the toxic fumes.
Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy met in 2012, lived an hour apart, and met in person no more than five times. However, they frequently texted each other, exchanging 60,000 messages over the course of two years. Roy suffered from social anxiety and depression, which prompted suicidal thoughts. Carter consistently encouraged him to take his own life, even when he was scared, and voiced doubts - a series of disturbing conversations that directly led to his death.
"You’re ready and prepared," texted Carter, days before Roy's death. "All you have to do is turn the generator on and you [will] be free and happy. No more pushing it, no more waiting." Then, when Roy expressed concerns about how his death will devastate his family, Carter wrote, "Everyone will be sad for a while, but they will get over it and move on... They know how sad you are and they know that you're doing this to be happy, and I think they will understand and accept it."
Two months after Roy's death, Carter confessed to a friend that she felt responsible for Roy's suicide. “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 f***ing told him to get back in," Carter wrote on Sept. 15, 2014. She was indicted on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in February 2015.
One day before the trial commenced, Carter waived her right to a jury, and Judge Lawrence Moniz found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter. "Miss Carter knows – by her own admission – that Mr. Roy has followed her instructions," said Moniz, on June 6, 2017. "As she indicates in various text messages subsequently created to some of her friends, she indicates that she can hear him coughing and she can hear the loud noise of the motor."
Carter was sentenced to two half and a years in prison, of which she must serve a minimum of two months. She began serving her time last February.
Watch the trailer for HBO's true crime documentary 'I Love You, Now Die'HBO produced a true crime documentary about the stunning case, entitled 'I Love You, Now Die.' On Wednesday, the network released the chilling first trailer on YouTube. The clip shows Carter and Roy's text messages superimposed over a beach, illustrating the power of words amongst intense, emotional teenagers.
"There was genuine franticness about the volume [of texts]. We had a record, in real time, of the degradation of two people’s mental state as primary evidence," said the film's director, Erin Lee Carr, while speaking with Refinery 29.
I really hope that this case and this film generates a sense of awareness about how we treat others," she added. "When you do text somebody else, or you're tweeting, we need to remember that somebody else is on the other side of that. I just think we have lost our way a bit when it comes to this."
The film has no release date, as of this writing, but is expected to air in two parts this summer.
If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, contact Your Life Your Voice on 1-800-448-3000, or the National Suicide Prevention Hotline on 1-800-273-8255.
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