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Michelle Carter’s sentencing will take place this week in the infamous ‘texting suicide case’
Here’s everything you need to know
On June 16, 2017, Michelle Carter, 20, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter after texting her boyfriend to suicide.
Three years earlier, in 2014, Carter participated in what prosecutors called a “sick game of life and death,” triggering her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to commit suicide.
This week, on August 3, her sentencing will take place.
The family of Conrad RoyThe couple met in Florida in 2012, only hanging out in person a handful of times but staying in touch for years via text.
Roy had repeatedly expressed interest in committing suicide to Carter, but had also expressed reservations in leaving his family behind. The couple discussed everything from where to do it, to how to do it. “Hang yourself, jump off a building, stab yourself (I don’t know) there’s a lot of ways,” she said in one of their conversations.
Read the rest of the texts she sent him here.
On July 12, Roy died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his pickup truck in a store parking lot in Fairhaven, but immediately preceding his death, prosecutors say he got out of the vehicle.
Phone records show Roy called and talked to Carter twice, each time for 45 minutes. In a message Carter sent a friend following his death, she said: “I fucken told him to get back in.”
In later texts, she recalls feeling guilty.
During the trial, controversial psychiatrist Peter Breggin testified on behalf of Carter saying she could not be held responsible due to the side effects of her antidepressant, Celexa. However, prosecution said her crime was intentional: “A desire for attention and feeling of being trapped,” after she’d “promised friends he was missing.”
She wanted to be the “grieving girlfriend,” they said, claiming that she was also linked to another man immediately after her boyfriend’s death.
Although 17 at the time, Carter was charged as a juvenile offender, making her subject to adult punishment if convicted.
>babe will be following the sentencing with further updates to come this week.