Michelle Carter knew that if anyone found her text messages to her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, she might go to jail.

“(If the police) read my messages with him I’m done. His family will hate me and I can go to jail,” Carter texted a friend after her 18-year-old boyfriend used a gas-powered water pump to commit suicide in the parking lot of a Kmart.

Carter had asked Roy in a text message to delete her messages before he carried out the suicide last summer, but investigators found them anyway.

According to prosecutors, Carter pressured her boyfriend to go through with suicide for almost a week before he carried out the act. She counseled him to overcome his fears; researched methods of committing suicide painlessly; and lied to police, his family and her friends about his whereabouts during the act itself and after, prosecutors said.

Carter, who was 17 at the time of Roy’s death, now faces manslaughter charges in juvenile court in Massachusetts.

Her attorney argues, however, that the charges should be dropped because Carter’s messages are protected by free speech. According to attorney Joseph P. Cataldo, Carter was “brainwashed” into supporting Roy’s plan for suicide.

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“He ultimately persuaded a young, impressionable girl,” Caldato told reporters, according to South Coast Today. “Eventually he gets her to endorse his plan.”

But in an indictment released Friday, prosecutors outlined in detail the extent of Carter’s alleged role in helping Roy overcome his doubts about suicide.

For more than a week in July 2014, Carter and Roy exchanged hundreds of messages in which Carter insisted Roy would be better off dead.

“You’re finally going to be happy in heaven. No more pain,” she told him in one message. “It’s okay to be scared and it’s normal. I mean, you’re about to die.”

According to prosecutors, the two had struck up a romantic relationship – mostly online – in 2012. Her lawyer says they had only met a few times in person over the course of two years prior to Roy’s death.

Roy had a history of depression and had attempted suicide in the past, but his family was hopeful that he would get through it.

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“He seemed to be pulling out of it,” his grandmother Janice Roy told WBZ.

Text messages recovered by police, however, suggest that by 2014, Carter had gotten tired of Roy’s idle talk of suicide and she wanted him to go through with it – now.

“You always say you’re gonna do it, but you never do,” Carter complained. “I just want to make sure tonight is the real thing.”

At some point on the night of July 12, Roy went through with the suicide, using a gas-powered water pump. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning inside the cab of his truck.

While he was in the truck with the pump running, he was on the phone texting and talking with Carter, she told her friend.


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