FollowMany of you may remember the case about the girl and her mom who created a face MySpace account with full intent to hurt a girl that they didn’t like. Their plan worked. The girl did get hurt… she committed suicide. (We mentioned it in a Youth Culture Window article a while back.)
The case is now in the hands of the jury.
Drew (the mom) is charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of unauthorized computer access for allegedly violating the MySpace terms of service by creating a fake profile for a non-existent 16-year-old boy named “Josh Evans.” She faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for each charge.
According to prosecutors, Drew conspired to create the account with her then 13-year-old daughter, Sarah, and a then 18-year-old employee and friend of the family named Ashley Grills, for the purpose of inflicting psychological harm on 13-year-old Megan Meier, who then committed suicide.
Meier had angered the Drews by calling Sarah Drew a “lesbian.”
Meier, who suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts, fell in love with the fake “Josh,” prosecutors said. She killed herself only after he turned on her, and told her “the world would be a better place without you.”
Read the whole article here.
Posted in Bullying/Cyberbullying, Internet, News, Youth Culture | | Leave A Comment
Hang with me a second. I was one of those kids that never drank or got crazy or had premarital sex. so when i started ministering i wondered how i had avoided that stuff. so I asked some of my Amish (kidding)pure freinds why they didn’t do that stuff either. the common thread among us was that our parents were real (what they said at church is how they lived) and we didn’t want to disappoint them. i like pleasing God but honestly that was nothing compared to avoiding that disappointed dad look.
This mom on trial is not that different from so many of my kids parents. not much more mature than the kids. i wonder if we should spend more time helping parents become the kind of parents in Deut. 6:6-7 “these commandments that i give to you today are to be upon your hears. impress them on your children. talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” love to hear Jonathan’s take.
Jon,
I absolutely agree with you that it’s a good thing to spend some of our time helping parents develop their strategies for raising their children, which is exactly why we have begun to invest even more of our time at The Source into Parenting Seminars and our Parenting Page.