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.’ “…
Excellent Read: “The Girl From Plainville”Post + Comments (36)