The Megan Meier Myspace suicide case *Update: Conviction overturned* see page 23

[IntlSet]

I get angry everytime I think about this. I can't believe Lori Drew's neighbors have not tarred and feathered her or driven her out of the community. Is she receiving threats? Has she had damage done to her property? Is that entire community appalled? Can they do something to demonstrate it? Karma should be a bitch, and I only hope she gets what's coming to her.

[sarahcantiik]

^^
Me too IntlSet, I am angry that nothing could be done to prosecute this terrible woman! But like you said, karma is a bitch, and she will pay for this thing one way or another. This thing will bite her in the ass down the line.

[Speedy]

Originally Posted by IntlSet

I get angry everytime I think about this. I can't believe Lori Drew's neighbors have not tarred and feathered her or driven her out of the community. Is she receiving threats? Has she had damage done to her property? Is that entire community appalled? Can they do something to demonstrate it? Karma should be a bitch, and I only hope she gets what's coming to her.

Oh, yeah, the neighborhood AND the entire world has been giving them grief. I heard of one anonymous 911 call to their home, saying there was a dead body in the house. Cops and SWAT respond, only to find Lori Drew at home, doing nothing. This is just one of the things that have happened.

Their lawn has been damaged, the businesses they advertised for have cancelled their accounts, calls at all times of the day and night, death threats, etc, etc. Mrs. Drew surely didn't think this thing through.

But what saddens me is their own 13 year old child. She doesn't deserve any of this, she was guided by supposedly grown adults for her part in this.

[forever21]

I hate Myspace. I think the bad it has done outweigh the good. Preserving peoples' lives and safety of children is way more important than promoting music.

[devoted7]

Originally Posted by IntlSet

I get angry everytime I think about this. I can't believe Lori Drew's neighbors have not tarred and feathered her or driven her out of the community. Is she receiving threats? Has she had damage done to her property? Is that entire community appalled? Can they do something to demonstrate it? Karma should be a bitch, and I only hope she gets what's coming to her.

What's kinda humorous is that the police adviced Ron Meier (Megan's father) to have an alibi or someone with him most of the time. All the neighbors, town, and the the rest of the American people hates the Drews, they don't want him to be the "formal suspect" if anything should happen to Mrs. Drew.

[LivinLuxuriously]

Originally Posted by madamefifi

OK but...am I the only person here who noticed that Megan wrote that the "N" in her name stood for "neglected"? What's that all about? There is more to this story than meets the eye. I don't particularly want to get flamed but her parents maybe should've supervised her a little more? And didn't it say in the story that the minimum age for a myspace account is 14? So what kind of message were they sending to their emotionally fragile daughter by allowing her to break the rules? I agree that the other adults in the story are truly wretched but Megan's parents don't sound like paragons of maturity either. I think that is the basic problem right there--parents don't want to truly parent anymore.

Why does her myspace say she's 16, when the reports say she was 13, if it was supervised by her mother...?

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm...ndid=109782507

Just doing a bit of investigation here... by all accounts and reports thus far, the woman in charge of the hoax is definitely despicable.

Editted to add: And this My Space, created by the parents of the deceased teen after her death, says she's 15! Was she 13, 14, 15, or 16? This article for this post says she died before her 14th birthday...?

http://www.myspace.com/MEGAN_MEIER_OUR_ANGEL

[compulsivepurse]

Originally Posted by LivinLuxuriously

Why does her myspace say she's 16, when the reports say she was 13, if it was supervised by her mother...? http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm...ndid=109782507 Just doing a bit of investigation here... by all accounts and reports thus far, the woman in charge of the hoax is definitely despicable. Editted to add: And this My Space, created by the parents of the deceased teen after her death, says she's 15! Was she 13, 14, 15, or 16? This article for this post says she died before her 14th birthday...? http://www.myspace.com/MEGAN_MEIER_OUR_ANGEL

You have to be 16 to have an "unrestricted" account where people who are not on your pre-determined list of friends can contact you. My niece is 13 and her myspace says 17 (I found it once - but her Mom and grandparents know about it too).

I agree that MySpace is more evil than good under a certain age. It's almost like you should not be able to get on it unless you are 18 anymore - not just because of the perverts, but even nice people over 18 post a lot of sexual content on it. They forget that younger people are on there.

I hope Lori Drew goes to hell. I don't think karma is a b*tch because I've seen too many people do awful things and get away with it for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it makes me feel better to believe in hell (although it's more of an abtract belief than what Catholicism has said about it and I am not going to worry about how it works or if there is an actual "Devil").

[Speedy]

She would be 15 had she lived. She died just before (3 weeks I believe) her 14th birthday, and it was over a year ago.

Reagrdless, the parents maintain her page now.

IMHO, Mrs. Meier did more than most parents who's children have/had MySpace accounts. I think second-guessing them now is rather moot, they've paid for their error in judgement about the whole thing.

[Eugin]

I'm surprised the Drews haven't moved out of town yet given the amount of now national publicity surrounding the case. There's an interesting nytimes article by Judith Warner called "Helicopter Parenting Turned Deadly" on this case:

Helicopter Parenting Turns Deadly
Tags: lori drew, megan meier, teen suicide
Megan Meier, a 13-year-old from Dardenne Prairie, Missouri, killed herself last year after an online relationship she believed she was having with a cute 16-year-old boy named Josh went very sour. What she didn’t know – what her parents would learn six weeks after her death – was that “Josh” was the fictitious creation of Lori Drew, a then-47-year-old neighbor and the mother of one of Megan’s friends.
Or former friends. Megan had, essentially, dropped the other girl when she’d changed schools and tried to put an unhappy chapter of her junior high school life – fraught with weight problems and depression – behind her.
Drew’s daughter, one assumes, would have eventually gotten over it. But Drew didn’t. Instead, she got revenge.
She created a fake MySpace profile (she later told police she’d done so to “find out what Megan was saying online” about her daughter, according to a sheriff’s report). Working with her daughter, she led Megan to become infatuated with “Josh.” And then she delivered the blow. “I don’t like the way you treat your friends,” Drew wrote. According to Megan’s father, “Josh”’s last e-mail to his daughter read, “You are a bad person and everybody hates you … The world would be a better place without you.”
The Meier case got massive play in the national media this past week, coming as it did on the heels of a major new survey showing that up to one in three children in the United States have been harassed or bullied online.
But for me the tragedy highlighted another troubling issue that threatens our homes just as steadily as poisonous online communications. That is the disturbing degree to which today’s parents – and mothers in particular – frequently lose themselves when they get caught up in trying to smooth out, or steamroll over, the social challenges faced by their children.
You only hear about the most freakish cases, like that of Lori Drew or of Wanda Webb Holloway, the Texas mother who in 1991 tried to pay someone to murder the mother of her daughter’s chief cheerleading rival. (“The motive here was love, a mother’s love for a daughter,” said a police investigator at the time.) Yet everyday examples abound of parents whose boundary issues are not so extreme, but still qualify as borderline wacko.
“People now feel like having a good relationship with your child means you’re involved in every aspect of your child’s life,” says Rosalind Wiseman, author of “Queen Bees & Wannabes” and “Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads,” who travels the country speaking with and counseling parents, teachers and teens. “Nothing is off-limits” now between parents and their kids, she says. “There’s no privacy and there’s no critical thinking.”
Wiseman has heard stories of parents who hope to pave their child’s way to popularity by luring the in-crowd to parties with promised “loot-bag” giveaways like iPods and North Face fleeces. She recently heard of a father who, happening on an instant-messaging war between his child and a bunch of children on a sleepover, went over to the other house, called the other father outside, and began a fistfight that ended only after someone called the police. And of a mother who, unwilling to join her fifth-grade daughter in accepting the apology of another fifth-grader who’d bullied her in the playground, hounded the school incessantly, pushing for the other child to be expelled.
Parents, she says, routinely blow a gasket when they get it in their heads that they need to seek revenge on their child’s behalf. “It’s, ‘I’ve been wronged. My kid has been wronged, so I’ve been wronged; therefore I have to do whatever’s necessary, including being disgustingly immoral.’ ”
“Where are the brakes,” Wiseman asked, “on parental behavior?”
Otherwise put: where does adult behavior end and childish behavior begin?
“Morally speaking, they shouldn’t have done that,” a 22-year-old writing on Yahoo! Answers this week observed about the Drew case. “But I don’t think they should be held responsible b/c kids are mean to each other every day. It would not be any different than an actual 13 yr old boy being mean to another girl.”
That, of course, is the whole point.
Parents of teenagers are not supposed to act like teenagers. They’re not supposed to dress like teenagers or talk like teenagers or spend their days text-messaging teenagers – as one mom Wiseman encountered did, exchanging expressions of shock and dismay, after her 14-year-old daughter broke up with a popular and athletic boy. (“I was totally basking in the social status I was getting from the boy,” the very honest mother told Wiseman.)
Or, at least, parents weren’t supposed to act like this in the past.
“There used to be this kind of parent-child gradient, where the parent was expected to – and did – function at a different level than the child,” says clinical psychologist Madeline Levine, author of the 2006 book “The Price of Privilege,” who lectures frequently on child and adolescent issues. Now, she says, “that whole notion of parents being in an entirely different space than their children is disappearing.”
In part, Levine blames parenting experts for this turn of events.
She blames the self-esteem movement, decades of parenting advice that prized “communication” over limit-setting and safety. She blames the narcissistic needs of parents who want their children to like them at all costs. And in part, when thinking over the fused mother-daughter dyads she so often encounters in therapy, she indicts this generation of mothers’ loneliness, dissatisfaction in work and marriage, stress, sense of failure, and emotional isolation. In the end, she asks, when you’re feeling alone and blue, “Who are you sure is going to hang around with you? It’s your children.”
It’s very easy to put up walls to separate the likes of Lori Drew and Wanda Webb Holloway from the rest of us. Most of us, after all, are not sick or profoundly vindictive, entirely lacking in self-awareness or devoid of all empathy.
Still, we have all caught ourselves spending a little too much time worrying about (or gloating over) our children’s popularity. We spend a lot of time feeling our children’s pain and put a lot of thought into shaping their world to offer them the greatest possible degree of happiness. But our kids really need something much bigger from us than that. They desperately

[Speedy]

I remember the Wanda Webb Holloway case, man, that was so totally messed up. She wanted to hire a hitman to take the mother out, thinking the daughter would be so overcome with grief, she'd drop out of cheerleading, thereby giving Wanda's daughter a better chance to win the coveted head cheerleader position. Problem is, her daughter had already been banned because of the "loot-bags" Wanda bought for the voters of the cheerleaders. The kind she got were not allowed by the school.

Sadly, since this case (Meier's, not Holloway's) is a totally brand-new field of law breaking, I doubt Lori Drew and company will ever sufer more punishment than what they do right now, vigilantism. It's been said technology has outpaced our laws, and as specific cases like this come up, new laws may be made, but the core element, the ones we petition for the laws to be made for, escape punishment.

It would serve Lori's daughter if they did move, preferably to another state, so she can become anonoymous.

[H&H]

I'm all for internet.... this scares the hell out of me NOT for me but for my kids JIEKKS.

[jeslyn]

This is so sad. It feels that woman just planned and executed the murder of that little girl, knowing well how to manipulate her. She's so young and just alittle girl. May that vicious woman rot in hell!!! She has no sense of remorse by lying to herself that the suicide of Meier did not occur indirectly/directly by her merticulous calculations.

[helpl!!! slush]

thats the most insane thing i have ever heard how sick and twisted

i think if i had a daughter and someone caused that to happen i maybe would be spending time in jail because unless that family moved out of town i would not be able to live without going after them those sick pigs

[Roo]

http://www.kmbc.com/news/14759832/detail.html


No Charges Filed In MySpace Suicide Case




Prosecutor: Law Doesn't Allow For Charges


POSTED: 11:53 am CST December 3, 2007


ST. CHARLES, Mo. -- No criminal charges will be filed against people who sent cruel Internet messages to a 13-year-old girl before she committed suicide, the St. Charles County prosecutor said Monday.

The parents of Megan Meier of Dardenne Prairie, who hanged herself last year, said her suicide came minutes after she received mean messages through the social networking site MySpace.

County prosecutor Jack Banas said at a news conference there was no applicable statute to file charges in the case. Banas said he looked at laws related to stalking, harassment and child endangerment, but found no repeated incidents of threats to someone's life or health, and no organized conspiracy.

A police report said that a mother from the neighborhood and her 18-year-old employee fabricated a profile for a teenage boy online who pretended to be interested in Megan before he began bullying her. The police report indicates others gained access to the profile, and it is not clear who was sending Meier messages just before her death. Banas said based on additional interviews, the fake MySpace page was not created by the mother of one of Megan's friends. He said the page was created by the 18-year-old employee, though the mother and her 13-year-old daughter knew about the page. He said he was unable to speak directly with the 18-year-old, whom he said has been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment.

[Roo]

MEANWHILE... this guy is going to jail. Granted what he was doing was sexual in nature, but there really isn't that much of a difference when you really think about it (except that in this case, the perp was BLACK and male ). What's wrong with this picture?

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/techn...,3042163.story

Hacker gets 110 years for threats on MySpace

The man used MySpace to extort nude photos from Brevard girls, authorities say.

Sarah Langbein
Sentinel Staff Writer

A 33-year-old North Carolina man sentenced Friday to 110 years in prison used "tools of terror" to hack into the computers of Brevard County girls and extort nude pictures from them, an assistant U.S. attorney said.

Ivory Dickerson, a civil engineer, gained remote access to their computers, giving him the ability to type words onto their screens. He was arrested last December after girls at Rockledge High School told authorities their MySpace profiles had been hacked into and the person on the other end was demanding revealing and pornographic images.

He threatened to harm their family members, post nude pictures of them on the Web and, in one case, make a 17-year-old "the most well known girl at school" if they didn't do what he said, according to court records.

One victim, who was 15 at the time of the incident, told U.S. District Court Judge Anne Conway during Friday's sentencing hearing that she felt as though the computer intruder was watching her every move.

"I was afraid to walk outside because I didn't know if it was the neighbor," the girl said.

The victim's father called it a "living hell."

"The whole thing has turned our life upside down," the man said. His name is being withheld to protect the identity of his daughter.

Members of Dickerson's family in North Carolina also spoke, calling him a fair and honest person with many achievements, including being named "outstanding student" at his community college. They said Dickerson had a knack for making people laugh and that they would stand by him.

"I hate for this mistake to define the bigger picture of who he is," said his mother, Carmen Wake.

Dickerson's attorney, Harrison "Butch" Slaughter, urged a sentence that would give "light at the end of the tunnel."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg told the court that Dickerson used his computer-hacking skills -- "tools of terror," he called them -- to do evil.

While investigating the hacking case, the local FBI Innocent Images Task Force uncovered a cache of child pornography dating to 1998 and videos of Dickerson with young girls, thought to be about 15 years old. In the video, Dickerson boasts of drinking with them in his room and having sexual encounters with them, according to court records.

Conway handed Dickerson the maximum sentence on three counts of manufacturing child pornography, two counts of unlawful computer intrusion and one count of possession of child pornography. He pleaded guilty earlier this year.

Dickerson apologized but insisted that an unnamed co-conspirator was the one responsible for having direct contact with the girls.

"I would never have taunted those girls," he said.