The trial of Michelle Carter, accused of encouraging Roy Conrad to commit suicide via text messages when the two were both teenagers, is over.
In their closing arguments today, attorneys for the two sides presented starkly different versions of what are largely uncontested facts.
Conrad Roy had suffered for years from depression and indeed had attempted to take his life before.
Michelle Carter had at various points in her relationship with Roy been supportive of his struggles and had urged him to seek help.
And yet, in the days preceding Roy’s suicide, Carter had repeatedly sent text messages not only encouraging him to commit suicide but mocking him for failing to do so.
And she was on the phone with him the night of his suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his truck, seemingly while the act was underway, later telling a friend that when Roy got out of his truck, apparently balking, she told him to get back in.
Prosecutor Katie Rayburn focused intently on this moment, painting a picture not only of Carter’s cruelty and disregard for Roy’s life, but as the intentional outcome of a plan of monstrous selfishness Carter had hatched.
Carter, whom prosecutors depicted as insecure and in desperate need of the affirmation of her friends, had told some friends that Roy had gone missing a few days before and that she feared he had already committed suicide – a fiction she continued to perpetuate even while she was in communication with Roy.
Carter’s simple goal: attention. Carter, Rayburn said, wanted to bask in the pity and attention she would receive playing the part of the “grieving girlfriend.”
Afraid of being found out as a liar for saying Roy was missing, Carter pushed Roy to ultimately go through with a suicide he may have contemplated, but was in fact reluctant or unwilling to enact but for Carter’s influence.
“Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, he’s still alive,” Rayburn said in her closing arguments. “People are starting to ask questions.”
“So the defendant is stuck. And you can see in the text messages throughout the day that at this point she is more than urging, she’s telling Conrad, ‘It’s gotta happen.’ … ‘You can’t wait any longer.’”
“At that point your honor, Conrad Roy becomes essentially disposable to the defendant.”
But Carter’s defense team argued that Roy’s actions were ultimately his own responsibility.
Carter’s suicidal thoughts and plans were long-standing. Roy had researched suicide on the internet, corresponded with at least one other individual about suicide online and obtained the water hose he would use to pump carbon monoxide into his truck.
Joseph Cataldo, Carter’s attorney, also addressed the infamous night of the suicide, arguing that the story prosecutors have told is speculative.
While Carter told a friend that Roy was frightened and that she had ordered Roy back into the truck, Carter might have been lying – a tendency of hers the prosecution itself had highlighted.
And even if Roy did leave the truck, it was ultimately Conrad Roy and only Conrad Roy who could have made that decisions – and who could know why he did it.
“Conrad apparently knew [the hose] was working, and yet chose to get back in, but because he was ‘scared’ or ‘afraid,’ [prosecutors] want to basically replace that word that somehow therefore, after that, by going back in the car, that wasn’t his own decisions that he didn’t have the free, voluntary ability to say,” Cataldo said.
“He chose, he chose, your honor.”
“Did the Commonwealth prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he would have been alive,” without his communications with Carter, Cataldo said, “I suggest is lacking.”
Carter has waived the right to a jury. Judge Lawrence Moniz will decide the case, likely in coming days.
