Most parents with a teenager in the house would be aware of the allure of social networking sites such as MySpace, especially for girls. Responsible parents try to monitor their children’s digital activities in order to protect them from potential predators or inappropriate influences.
But in the case of American mother Lori Drew, responsible parenting mutated into such obsessive involvement in online teenage life that it set off a train of tragic events culminating in the suicide of her daughter’s former best friend.
Megan Meier was 13 when she hanged herself in her bedroom closet last year. Her parents, Tina and Ron Meier, say she had been driven to despair that afternoon by cruel comments posted on her MySpace website by “Josh Evans”, a 16-year-old boy she believed was her boyfriend, although she had never met him in person.
For weeks he had been showering her with compliments on MySpace but, that day, he turned nasty, writing: “I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.” Others in Megan’s MySpace group then taunted her about her weight and called her a “whore”. Mrs Meier says Josh’s final barb was: “The world would be a better off place without you.”
But, as the Meiers discovered six weeks after their daughter’s death, “Josh Evans” did not exist.
He was the creation of Lori Drew, the mother of a 13-year-old girl down the street in their small Missouri town.
It’s a shame they can’t find a way to charge Ms. Drew in assisting to cause the death of Megan.
Such a sad, sad, needless thing to have happen.