Neighbour Indicted After 13-Yr.-Old Girl Commits Suicide Over False MySpace Hunk
Posted May 15, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A major new wrinkle has developed in a grim story we’ve been following since last year. The mother accused of setting up an Internet site that allegedly drove her young neighbour to suicide has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Missouri.
You may not remember the name Megan Meier, but you’ll never forget what happened to her. The 13-year-old overweight and lonely child was thrilled when she started chatting with a handsome home-schooled hunky teen named Josh Evans over MySpace, and was excited that he seemed attracted to her.
But after several months of contact, Evans told her he’d heard she was talking disparagingly about her friends and he no longer wanted to have anything to do with her. In the message that seemed to send her over the edge, he pointedly told her the world would be better off without her.
Her parents tried to comfort the distraught, crying and troubled girl but she was inconsolable. They later found her hanging in her bedroom, apparently driven to suicide by her rejection.
It was a tragic shock, and the next one was equally unexpected. It turned out there was no “Josh Evans” at all. He’d allegedly been made up by the Meiers’s next door neighbour, Lori Drew, a mother whose own daughter had complained that Megan was saying terrible things about her.
Drew has always claimed one of her employees set up the website and she knew about it only from a distance. But she insists she never sent any of the messages and was unaware of their contents.
But a grand jury disagrees and has now found there are grounds to accuse her of conspiracy and using a computer to inflict emotional distress. If convicted, she could go to jail for up to five years.
The 19-year-old employee who admits setting up the profile claims Drew not only knew what was happening, but composed some of the messages that “Evans” sent out. But she confesses she wrote the final missive as a way to end the relationship. She never dreamed the consequences that would follow.
“I was trying to get her angry so she would leave him alone and I could get rid of the whole MySpace,” Ashley Grills told a U.S. news show.
Megan’s death was investigated by Missouri authorities, but no state charges were filed because there were no laws on the books that covered this kind of incident. The city of Dardenne Prairie, Missouri has since enacted its own legislation designed to prevent Internet harassment, but it was too late to save Megan.
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Woman accused of setting up false MySpace page breaks her silence
