Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic MySpace Hoax Leads To Child Suicide.

I’ve finally decided to post, as I fear that saying nothing could be construed as tacit agreement with some of the thoughts expressed. I personally disagree with some of what TEEEEEEEJ has written, so I thought I would express yet another viewpoint on a couple of things that she said, even though she has made it clear that she will not be revisiting this thread.

I will not comment on the gun control issue, because A) that would be pulling the thread off-topic and B) although many people thrive on political debate, I don’t.

From all accounts that I’ve read, Megan’s computer time was being closely supervised. But no, that wasn’t the case on that particular afternoon. But that’s not a contradiction, it simply is a circumstance. If every time you leave the house you remember to lock the front door, yet one day you forget, would it be fair for me to say that you never do it? No, it means that one day you made a mistake, and hopefully there were no serious circumstances because of it.

Should Megan’s mother have made her daughter turn off the computer immediately and taken her with her to the orthodontist’s office? Perhaps – and in hindsight, I’m sure that she wishes that she had done so. Again, an error in judgement, but it probably didn’t seem so at the time. A simple – yet ultimately tragic – mistake.

What reason do you have to think that she wasn’t taught that?

I have a teenager. Fortunately he has never dealt with the emotional problems – low self-esteem, weight issues, depression, ADD – that Megan had. My husband and I have taught him to obey the rules that we, his teachers, and society have laid down. He is a good kid. Yet he has disobeyed us, more than once. It’s been little things – fortunately – and he’s had to suffer the consequences of his actions. As I said, he has been taught not to disobey, yet he has. He’s made a mistake. I believe that is the case with Megan too. Based on the children that I know, all of them have disobeyed at one time or another. If anyone has the secret of making their children obey – all the time and every time, no matter what – please share it with the rest of us, because that is a skill that many of us don’t seem to possess.

So perhaps the parents aren’t blameless here. Perhaps mistakes were made, where, if a slightly different path had been taken at that moment, Megan would still be alive today. I have never had to deal with the death of a child, but I’m pretty sure that her parents are kicking themselves every day, wondering if they had just given a different answer, reacted a moment sooner…

But in my mind this in no way relieves the culpability of the woman who opened the fake MySpace account. Although her identity has been revealed on a number of internet websites, I’m not going to use it since it has not been reported by the mainstream news. Mrs. X has not talked publicly about her role in all this, but in the filed police report she stated that she started the fake account to find out what nasty things that Megan was saying about her daughter behind her daughter’s back. If I had been the woman and believed that something like this was going on, I would have tried to talk to Megan’s parents first before taking any other action…but maybe that’s just me.

Mrs. X chose another route. She deliberately created a profile of an attractive young man who told Megan he thought that she was pretty, in order to quickly gain her confidence. After a number of weeks, did she have any evidence that Megan in fact was saying nasty things about her daughter? It doesn’t appear to be so. For whatever reason, Mrs. X decided that the charade had gone on long enough. Suddenly terminating the connection would probably have been devastating for Megan no matter how it had been done, and perhaps with the same results. But rather than “Josh” telling Megan that it was over because his mother was cutting him off the internet, for example, Mrs. X chose to close it out in the most hurtful way that she could, by having “Josh” insulting Megan, calling her fat and a slut, and telling her that the world would be a better place without her.

How can we have any sympathy for a woman who would do this? And this was a woman who personally knew the girl, knew of her depression and self-esteem issues. How can any self-respecting adult do something like that to a young girl? I don’t understand it. Maybe someone does, but I don’t.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Kathy