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Woman indicted in Missouri MySpace suicide case
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In October 2006, 13-year-old Megan Meir hanged herself allegedly after receiving cruel messages from a fake MySpace account originally designed to make her believe that a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans was interested in her. Yesterday, Lori Drew, 49, of suburban St. Louis, who allegedly helped create the account, was indicted by a federal grand jury on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress.
Salvador Hernandez of the FBI, which investigated the case, told the Associated Press, “The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl’s weaknesses. Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she’s responsible for her actions.”
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I suppose the maximum punishment for this insane lady is to have her computer taken away for 90 days?
Will she have web access in prison?
The indictment sounds reasonable, based on what we’ve heard.
a little different angle..
how was megan raised and taught and prepared to handle 1)the internet? 2)interchange on the web? 3)emotional actions/reactions to life’s situations?
how have other parents taught their children of the same age encountering similar things? apparently, such a tragedy is rare.
..curious as to megan’s parents training.
Mytwosense:
Megan was 13. She was a child.
Lori, however, is a 40-something adult.
While I don’t know anything about how Megan’s parents trained her, I doubt that any but the most mature child, how ever well trained she may be, could withstand a full-on attack of this nature by a determined adult.
Adults who do things like this ought properly to be held culpable, to the full extent of the law, regardless of the fact that her chosen weapon of harm was the internet.
thomas,
Well put. And I understand that position.
I recall a man years ago who was so upset with a neighbor kid’s (a minor) treatment of his son, that he went over to the house, lectured him and shoved him.
Bad enough.
But what if the shove led to a fall and fatal head injury or a horrible, reactionary follow-up by the shoved kid?
With the Megan case, we face the electronic form of it.
The details of the final punishment and/or appeals will be quite instructive. AND, particular impact on front-end agreements required by the web cos.
No doubt, lawyer workload will not drop off.
IF the allegations against her are true, then she would be fully deserving of more punishment than is likely available under the charges brought, and may get nailed for a hefty damage award in a civil action filed after a guilty verdict is rendered.
We will need to see if the charges are indeed proven.
What awful things people tell each other on youtube comment sections and forums daily, in high volume, is incredible.
I wouldn’t think there’s any way the mother would be found guilty of intending what actually took place.
We’ll see.
It’s interesting that these statutes were already enacted when this took place. Someone legislator should get a gold star for proposing it.
According to a report on MSNBC and the Today Show, Megan had been battling ADD and depression and had contimplated suicide previously. Inflicting emotional distress upon a child with these kinds of issues was cruel. An adult should have known better.
There is no excuse for an adult to bully a child, whether its in person or online. MS Drew thought she got away with something when the state of Mo failed to do anything.
And the drugs they put kids on, young, with their associated side effects, is another layer, but off the main subject.
..a whole other story.
I’d expect a guilty plea. She’s already made incriminating admissions. Of course, she made them after the Missouri DA decided not to pursue criminal charges under state law. She must not have considered that she would be charged under a federal statute.
I doubt that she’ll want to risk being found guilty and having to serve a 20-year sentence. She can probably plead out and serve a mere 5-7 years.
Of course, it’s still not clear to me why she couldn’t be charged with involuntary manslaughter or depraved-heart murder. Justice would be served if Drew and her daughter spent the rest of their days behind bars. The mother will probably only serve a few years. The Drew daughter, who instigated the whole affair, will probably not serve any time for her crimes.
Klasko, you have to prove this woman knew the dead girl was suffering from these problems.
I don’t know how you would get a murder/manslaughter charge out of what we know about this, Kiyoshi. These people didn’t touch this child physically. They weren’t present. She killed herself. It was her choice. Moreover, you’d have to prove intent, remember?
Klasko, you have to prove this woman knew the dead girl was suffering from these problems.
I don’t know how you would get a murder/manslaughter charge out of what we know about this, Kiyoshi. These people didn’t touch this child physically. They weren’t present. She killed herself. It was her choice. Moreover, you’d have to prove intent, remember?
NJLawyer,
Perhaps you could comment on this more, but it seems to me that the scary thing about this whole case is the apparently new powers the government is given to press charges, 1. for something that should be tort and not criminal and 2. transferring jurisdiction to another state.
What exactly does this mean:
“accessing protected computers without authorization to get information used to inflict emotional distress on the teen”
And this:
“…without having to ship the case to a different state…we have to go to federal courts in other states to make a stretching leap argument.”
On top of that, how do you define “harassing a minor?” What reasonableness condition do you place on that? Is jurisdiction limited or because it’s the internet, all you have to do is prove that some part of the transmission “traveled” through the state you want to prosecute in?
I’m not sure about the legal ramifications, but morally this was reprehensible.
Even if the girl did not have a history of depression, this was a terrible thing to do to a child/teen. It would have been hurtful enough to another adult, but teens are so emotionally vulnerable.
I had a similar-but-different thing happen to me when I was about 15. My best friend’s former best friend (from the town she used to live in) was visiting her, & they called me. BF’s-former-BF pretended to be a guy who really wanted to meet me. (I was overweight & had not yet had a boyfriend.)
She pretended to “like” me over the phone & talk about how I was going to be “his” girl when we all got together. I was so thrilled!
Then they let me in on the joke. They thought it was hilarious that I believed it. I was humiliated.
32 years later, I can still remember how awful that felt. And that was nothing like what this young girl experienced.
Karen O.,
That is pretty awful. I had sort of similar things happen to me when I was a kid (not on that level, but I got mocked a lot, and had boys pretend to like me to make other boys laugh). What this woman did was wrong–but to call it murder is a huge stretch. I can’t imagine even the parents wanting her prosecuted for murder. And the parents of this girl really should have been monitoring her computer use too, and on top of the situation. I’m not saying they’re to blame, but they clearly weren’t on top of it, either. A 13-year-old shouldn’t have unlimited computer access, as I assume she did; this got to such a level because nobody was looking out for her.
Yeah, Cheryl, it seems like it was a bad situation all around.
I hate to say it, but this girl chose to be foolish and kill herself over something this childish and stupid. Everybody gets made fun of and has jokes and pranks played on them. Sure, it stinks that this woman did this, but she shouldn’t be prosecuted for it. God will punish her much worse than any court anyway. I feel badly for this girl’s family, but come on.
Bianca,
I don’t think this woman should be prosecuted for murder or anything close, possibly not at all. In one sense she probably has been “punished enough.” But in another sense, a child is dead, and she is at least indirectly the reason–due to a deliberate action on her part, though not deliberately murderous. By comparison, I don’t think that a person who accidentally runs over a child should go to prison for it–but sometimes there needs to be a trial. (Were there indications the driver was overly negligent–drunk, for instance?)
In this case, the intention wasn’t death–but the intention WAS harm, and that should matter. And also, I don’t know if you remember being 13, but I do. One of two years of my life that would qualify as “worst ever,” and I’d probably give it the prize for worst year, simply because I didn’t have the maturity or resources to deal with life. We can expect a 13-year-old to be immature and not able to deal with life without adult support. An adult stooping to immature cruelty is not acceptable. In other words, yes the girl might seem to be “foolish and stupid”–but she’s 13, and we can rather expect foolish and stupid at that age. And a 13-year-old under this kind of pressure is quite likely to cave under it. And “everybody gets made fun of” does NOT cover this, any more than “everyone gets hurt sometimes” would be adequate when talking to someone who has been raped.
When I was 14, a 13-year-old acquaintance killed himself. I had never attempted suicide, but I understood in a way only a recent 13-year-old can, and the adults talking about how “silly” he had been only showed me they didn’t have a clue how hard it is to be 13.