Teenagers, these days! Boomers, GenXers, and even Millennials like to tell each other that their obsessions with those new-fangled portable communication devices will lead to nothing but misery. Certainly some of those barely-fledged technopiles make spectacularly bad choices, which is hardly an innovation. But smartphones and the internet have exposed a myriad of individual tragedies to a degree not achievable since the days when humans expanded beyond the hunter-gathering status where everybody was literally all up in their whole society’s business. Jesse Barron, in Esquire, falls a little bit too far in love with his subject, but (even though I live in the same intensively media’d area) this is the most informative report on the Conrad Roy/Michelle Carter tragedy I’ve read:
The text messages started the night her son went missing. Lynn Roy saw the first one around ten-thirty on July 12, 2014: “Do you know where he is?” She saw the second the next day: “Did you call the police yet?” Then a third: “Any news?” The sender, Michelle Carter, was familiar to Lynn as a girl her son, Conrad, texted. She guessed they were friends. It turned out Michelle was right to be worried: That afternoon, July 13, police found Conrad in the parking lot of the Kmart on Route 6 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide from a water pump in the cab of his F-250.
A few days later, Conrad’s father, Conrad Roy II, discovered a spiral-bound journal at his house. Inside, his son had written down the passwords to his iPhone and to his laptop, along with suicide notes. One was addressed to Michelle, whom Conrad II knew as a girl his son had met years ago, on vacation. “Keep strong in tough times,” it read. “Our songs, listen to them and remember me.” Another said: “Dad, I’m sorry I wasn’t the boy you wanted.” Conrad II was a salvage-boat operator, which entailed frequent two-week stints away from home, including one that began the day after Conrad was born. Lately, relations between father and son had been fraught. That February, after a fight, Conrad II had been arrested for punching his son in the face and sending him to the hospital.
The Roys lived in Mattapoisett, a harbor town of six thousand on the state’s south coast. The week after Conrad died, they held his wake at a local funeral parlor. In the receiving line, a blond seventeen-year-old girl waited patiently with her mother and introduced herself to Lynn as Michelle Carter. Michelle came from a suburb called Plainville an hour north. Lynn had never been there. It was landlocked, Waspy…
When school started in September, everyone at King Philip High, in Wrentham, saw that Michelle Carter was broken up over the tragic death of her boyfriend. On the thirteenth—the day after what would have been Conrad’s nineteenth birthday—she held a fund-raiser for suicide prevention in his honor. Girls surrounded her, picked her up to pose for photos. Privately, some of them were confused. “Before the suicide,” one of her soccer teammates told me, “he was never her boyfriend—he was just ‘my friend.’ “…
A few months after Conrad’s suicide, while Michelle was waiting for her dad to pick her up after school, a man approached and introduced himself as a police detective. Michelle is five-foot-four, and the detective towered over her. He had reviewed Conrad’s phone, and said he knew she’d been talking to Conrad the night of his death. “Until he stopped having contact with anybody,” the detective said.Michelle’s voice was lowish and polite, ready to assist. “He told me there was no one to help him,” she said. “I was talking to him on the phone the night before the twelfth, and the phone, like, hung up. I didn’t really think anything of it.”
The detective said he had a search warrant for her phone…
To be worried over by a girl is one of the greatest pleasures a teenage boy can lay claim to. Conrad must have felt it, because Michelle’s response elicited further confessions. He said his stomach was fucked from the Tylenol; she said her liver was fucked from her eating disorder. He said he saw the devil in the hospital; she said the devil crawled in bed with her and told her she was going to hell…
That June, Michelle went to McLean Hospital in Belmont to be treated for anorexia. She told Conrad that he should join her, to get help for his depression. Being admitted to McLean, she said, “would be so good for you and we would get thru our issues together. Think about it. You aren’t gonna get better on your own, you know it no matter how many times you tell yourself you are. You need professional help like me, people who know how to treat it and fix it.”
Conrad didn’t take her up on it. Three weeks later, he told her he was suicidal…
Villago Delenda Est
This is the sort of story that Donald cannot relate to.
Also, the link in the blockquoted area takes you to a google search page on hyperlinks.
The Moar You Know
Probably not the prevailing opinion here, but I don’t understand how a judge could rule she gets jail time.
Yeah, she’s a little sociopath, and awful, but those things are not crimes.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Moar You Know: Meanwhile, an actual sociopath has access to the nuclear launch codes.
PsiFighter37
Thinking about how to handle kids with all this social media stuff is enough o almost make me not want to have kids. It was hard enough when it was just AOL Instant Messenger and MySpace back when I was growing up…
Betty Cracker
Here’s a working link to the Esquire article in case anyone is looking for it…
efgoldman
@PsiFighter37:
We already had ours. She’s 36 and basically became an adult the same time social media exploded. Now SHE (and SIL) have to figure out how to handle it with granddaughter, just four. I have no advice at all.
Betty Cracker
@PsiFighter37: Can’t remember where I heard it, but some kid recently said how cruel it was for parents to take away their kids’ phones / wi-fi as punishment, likening it to depriving them of oxygen. I think that’s a bit extreme, lol, but having raised a teenager, I do believe it is much more profound a deprivation than it was when my mom told me I couldn’t watch TV for a week as punishment. It’s like ordering them into an isolation tank — even in the same room, they’ll communicate with devices.
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker: TYVM, Betty, saved me all the INTENSE LABOR of clicking and whatnot.
JPL
A few moms that I know, whom have high school students, charge the students phones in their room overnight.
rikyrah
What a horrid story.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: I was flying out of Logan Airport a couple of weeks ago and we had time to kill (my wife is one of those people who feels frantically rushed if we’re at the airport only two hours before departure) so we stopped to have a bite. Two tables over was a family of five: two middle-aged adult parents and three kids probably from middle school to high school. For at least a half-hour they exchanged not one word with each other, at least not using their larynx. Head down and thumbs flying, every single one.
Woodrowfan
@JPL: bad for the battery, good for the kids!
Lahke
Haven’t followed the link on this article but have reading the story for months in the Globe, and folks, this “little girl” pushed him to suicide, including telling him to get back into the car and finish the job of dying. No sympathy here.
Villago Delenda Est
After reading the full story, I don’t know what to think.
Who could have known this would be so complicated?
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Lahke:
Agreed. Suicide was an option,but he made a choice when he stepped out of the vehicle. She emotionally and psychologically manipulated him into doing a thing he’d wanted not to do. I suspect she is mentally ill as well, so perhaps treatment instead of straight incarnation is in order. But she is not a victim.
Schlemazel
We put a lot of responsibility on kids not yet mature enough to handle it. I think she did a horrible thing by encouraging him but at the same time she was telling him to hang on. I do not think she is mentally at a stage where she could rationally understand what she was doing. I could easily see her thinking she was helping and that he had made up his mind so she was going to let him do what he really wanted to do. The whole thing is a hot mess.
Suzanne
@PsiFighter37: Social media is such a PITA with Spawn the Elder. They all have Snapchat, so everything disappears into the ether, so I can’t monitor it. Ughhhhh.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker: The damn kids do most of their communicating digitally, so it’s not just like removing TV…..it’s like locking them in a tower for a week.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Villago Delenda Est:
*Smirks* This is why Trump won.
/s God I hate when assholes say that.
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: Exactly right.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
You do understand that’s why they use Snapchat, no parental access.
In the olden days we had distance, and keeping our mouths shut. What they didn’t know…….
gvg
Read the story. Complicated. I don’t think I was ever messed up enough to not have yelled to may parents if anyone had talked about suicide. I do think the girl has unaddressed issues. the very end reporter interview with the former friend Alice was very uncomfortable.
opiejeanne
@gvg: Yes. Was she just looking for a suicidal friend whose demise would focus attention on her?
Mom Says I*m Handsome
My kids are between 7 and 13. None have smart phones. None have social media accounts (FB, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.). None have laptops or iPads. The oldest two have “bar-of-soap” phones that can call, text, and take low-rez pictures. They get 15 minutes a day to do “electronics” (typically playing Minecraft or Roblox, or watching music videos), and an hour a day on the weekends, AFTER they’ve done their homework, their chores, AND they’ve spent at least a couple of hours running around outside.
And they’re happy. They can hold a conversation with anyone, including grownups. They sleep a full night’s sleep and they get good grades. They’re shitty with one another like kids are, they’re lazy and inattentive and normal. They catch occasional shit from their peers about being techno-laggards — I know this will intensify over time — but I’ll be damned if I aid and abet their decline into being semi-sentients bags of slop whose only moving parts are their freaking thumbs.
The Atlantic has a terrifying article about early research on the impact of smart phones on kids. I’m treating them like they’re radioactive (the phones, not the kids).
ETA: I do recognize that the Atlantic author’s data analysis is suspect (I have concerns about sample size, methodology, etc.) but I consider it to be consistent with concerns raised elsewhere, like our pediatrician, the clinician who’s diagnosed my kids, and others.
raven
I have a friend who is a prominent professor in the area of child development and she is recommending that people start drug testing their kids in jr high so that when they get to high school they have a built in rationale for not drinking and drugging. Ya’ll do what the fuck you want, I’m glad I decided not to have kids.
Mart
@raven: Back in the late sixties most all my friends in Jr High would have tested positive. Things were pretty bleak – Vietnam, race riots, Kennedy, MLK shot. Think a little weed was good for our nerves, got to act dumb and laugh.
aimai
I have mixed feelings about calling this girl a sociopath. I think she had a lot of problems and so did he, and that they were both extremely needy and narcissistic and desperate. I think the burden of being the one to whom a suicidal person “confides” and on whom they depend is a real mind fuck and I don’t think that any young person is necessarily well equipped to handle that pressure. I think that a long distance, text based, relationship is not like a real relationship and people can get into the habit of saying things to the other person that they don’t mean, and that they don’t mean to be taken seriously. Text makes it more like a video game in which you are constantly able to hit “reset” and when the person disappears off of text you don’t really grasp that they can be dead (even though the two of you may have discussed “death” previously.) I put that in quotes because I don’t think American teens like this have much real grasp of death at all.
I also think that people have mixed feelings–including anger and despair at being needed so much, as well as a desire to be needed and a confusion between “need” “love” and “importance.” Think there is a way in which this girl may have wanted this boy to go ahead and finally kill himself to get out from under an incredibly demanding weight: the burden of his unhappiness which she could no longer carry.
I think the 15 months in prison was a good sentence for her. She needs a lot of help–I don’t think she is a sociopath in the conventional sense such that she lacked empathy and did this for kicks. I think she sounds more like a person who has too much empathy, too little core, too little ability to put up boundaries and she got involved with someone who was hurting and had some of the same problems and, seeing themselves as outsiders, they got into a folie a deux.
raven
@Mart: I was high as the cost of living then.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: I managed to raise three kids to adulthood without ever drug-testing them. You talk to them, you pay attention to what they do and who they do it with, and you understand that they will do stupid shit once in a while but it ain’t the end of the world. Sure, some of it is luck, but a lot of it is pretty simple stuff.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mom Says I*m Handsome:
A FB “friend” — young woman, married, one kid — posted a photo the other day of her husband and < 2-year-old son side by side in bed, each of them holding and staring intently at their individual smartphones. Mom’s caption was “Like father, like son! Adorable!”
Of course, it got lots of likes and love hearts.
Needless to say, I was horrified on several levels.
low-tech cyclist
My son’s just turned 10, going into the 5th grade. He’s got no phone, and a Kindle that he can only access limited places with. We’re trying to figure out how to give him room to use the Web as a learning resource, while minimizing his exposure to everything from social media to porn. Parenting is a hell of a lot more complicated now than it must’ve been just a decade ago, let alone pre-Internet.
catclub
@Lahke:
I have a hard time with that when cops shooting people get off scot-free. She only killed him if he had no agency.
let me know when we advocate prosecuting anybody for yelling ‘Jump, you fuckers.’
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
I Googled “How to monitor SnapShap” and got 2.6 million hits – people sell tools you can use to monitor ShapChat, whatever that is.
LurkerNoLonger
@low-tech cyclist: Whatever you do, keep him away from Balloon Juice.
Mom Says I*m Handsome
@low-tech cyclist: I never thought I’d see the day when my kids’ discovery of p0rn was the least of my worries…
Lahke
@catclub: Well, I think the cops should do time too, as well as the Wall Street fuckers. Such a pity I’m not the queen.