Meddling Mom Ought To Be Jailed
The story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old Missouri girl who committed suicide after being spurned by the person she thought was her online boyfriend, just keeps getting stranger and more infuriating by the moment.
Megan had transferred schools earlier this year after being excluded from the “popular crowd” because she was overweight. In the process, she decided she no longer wanted to maintain some of her old friendships. But at her new school she blossomed, dropping 20 pounds and joining the volleyball team. She even met her first-ever boyfriend, “Josh”, through her MySpace page.
Only problem? Josh was actually 47-year-old Lori Drew, the mother of one of those friends Megan had stop hanging out with, and she was determined to “mess with Megan”. That’s what she told a neighbor, at any rate. What she told the police is that she wanted to gain Megan’s trust so she could find out what Megan was saying online about her own daughter.
So Drew, pretending to be Josh, flirted with Megan for a full month. Then, just as Megan began thinking of herself and Josh as a couple, Drew-as-Josh typed: “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.” A day later came the fatal message: “The world would be a better place without you.”
Later, Megan told her mother that hateful MySpace messages about her were being posted. Some called her a slut. Some called her fat.
Megan hung herself in her closet. Her mother found the girl and cut her down from the belt she’d wrapped around her own neck. Megan died the next day still believing that her first boyfriend had wholly rejected her.
Megan had been on antidepressants, a fact of which Lori Drew was aware since Megan had previously accompanied the Drews on family vacations. She’d also been diagnosed with ADD and had been under the care of a counselor. But those sensitivities were, apparently, not nearly as important to Lori Drew as teaching Megan a lesson that proved to be fatal.
All of this, because middle-aged Lori Drew couldn’t accept what normal adults figured out long ago: friendships end, and the best way to help our kids when they’ve been dumped by a friend is by helping them learn to make new ones. Megan Meiers mother didn’t get a chance to do that because Lori Drew abdicated her parental role and took matters into her own hands, posing as another child so she could — let’s face it — get petty revenge on the girl who’d hurt her little girl’s feelings.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing the law can do about it. As the St. Charles’ County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson says of Drew’s behavior, “It might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”
Ironically, Lori Drew filed a report with the Sheriff’s department against Megan’s parents for damaging a foosball table belonging to the Drews. It seems Megan’s family had agreed to store the table in their garage at Lori’s request. Six weeks after Megan’s death, when they learned that Lori Drew was behind the hoax that led to her suicide, they took a sledgehammer and ax to it and dumped the pieces on the Drew’s driveway.
Yes, you read that right: Lori Drew all but caused Megan Meiers’ suicide, then wanted to press charges against Megan’s family for taking their grief out on a foosball table.
You know, that woman ought to be damned glad she’s not my neighbor. I’d have skipped the table and gone straight after her with the sledgehammer and ax.
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To this day this particular story still shocks the heck out of me. Each time I read an update or see something related to the story it makes me twitch. These are the people that keep the world from being a better place. They are so petty and selfish because that’s how they are taught to be, they are teaching their children to be the same way.
You are right, Lori Drew deserves to be in jail. I’d prefer the death penalty by hanging - afterall that’s how the girl committed suicide. Unfortunately that will never happen. We look at these events and shrug, shake our heads, it’s a tragedy, they happen everywhere. Is there really any way to prevent them? Are we really sticking our heads in the sand?
Apparently it never even occurred to this woman to have her daughter call Megan to find out why she didn’t want to be friends anymore. Hurting her was much more important and if her daughter was so extremely upset or worried about her reputation for whatever reason, perhaps she needs counselling as well. Has anyone asked Lori Drew what she’d have done if the roles were reversed?
I bet they can’t. If she has one ounce of sense in her head (and, admittedly, that’s questionable), she’s changed her name by now.
I have to wonder, after all the publicity this has received, if Lori Drew’s daughter has any friends anymore. I mean, if it was me, my children would be warned to stay away from her! So not only did this woman cause the death of another girl, she has very likely ruined any other friendship her daughter might have currently and for the forseeable future.
Then again, considering how very wacked out this woman was over Megan dumping her daughter as a friend - maybe her daughter doesn’t have any other friends.
This is an unbelievable story and so very sad. There is no place that woman can go to and escape what she has done. She will to live with what she has done and I hope she publicly ridiculed for the rest of her life if there is no legal way to serve justice.
There is nowhere that woman can go, no. She’ll face the rest of her life feeling from all the people around her a small measure of the abuse she piled on Megan’s head. I for one hope she leads a long, healthy, and impoverished existence.
I suspect Megan’s family will sue them, and they’ll own everything including the once-foosball table that the Drew family has.
Well, I doubt someone who would press charges against a grieving family (at her own hands) will feel much guilt. That would imply a conscience and for any adult to prey on a child like that kind of removes that point from the discussion in my book. They might end up moving to escape the story, but that’s all I can really see happening — aside from long term therapy Drew’s daughter may need at a later date. I’d say she’s lucky that ALL the Meier family destroyed was the foosball table.
Okay, Kate, you’re the one here with the legal background. After thinking about this, doesn’t this fit, without even credibly stretching the definition, the criteria for criminally negligent and/or reckless conduct, both of which are components of manslaughter?
It’s predators like this that caused me to create my website, dedicated to online safety for children. The stuff that can and does happen to kids is unbelievable. This woman deserves to be punished severely.
Poor Megan… 13 years old. I hope Lori Drew has nightmares for the rest of her life.
If you though that public humiliation was old school, then check this out.
http://hitsusa.com/blog/317/megan-meier-suicide/
You don’t have to read very far down this page to know that these awful people are suffering a fate worse than the Law could ever impose.
Thats a nice new pic of you, you have a very pretty face ,just a little comment to make your day a little better ,I love your website too
dear lord. that mother is a piece of trash. i feel sorry for her daughter…who no doubt has been damaged by this and most likely so much more. another reason i hate myspace.
OMG, this is just awful and she cannot be charged with anything??? And to think they still live four houses down from one another. I would have destroyed more than their table.
That woman would be dead. Period. Screw the law, screw “community morality” or whatever bullshit PC belief system. Someone fucks with my kids and causes that, would die. Horribly.
The good news is that local municipalities around the St. Louis area are knocking themselves out to criminalize “harassment” on the Internet.
Which means that, in a couple of years, any serious snark on the Internet might be subject to prosecution.
That’s what happens when a single sordid incident, tragic as it is, dictates immediate legislation to placate people who feel as strongly as you guys do.
WG asked:
Certainly Drew’s conduct was negligent. No reasonable person would believe it OK for a 47-year-old woman to pose as a boy and flirt with a young girl for the purpose of hurting her feelings.
But the next question is whether she wantonly disregarded the likelihood that her conduct would lead Megan to commit suicide. That’s a “knew or should have known” standard, and to some extent there’s a question about whether Megan’s response was reasonable, too.
I don’t know that Megan’s family will be able to convince a jury that Drew knew or should have known Megan would try killing herself after “Josh” dumped her, even IF she was on anti-depressants. (There’s no indication Megan had exhibited suicidal tendencies before, and the majority of spurned 13 y/o girls don’t react in that way.)
I guess for me the clincher is that it demonstrates a pretty clear example of reckless behavior. Responsible adults do not pose as teens with the sole intention of a) misleading them into divulging emotional baggage, and b) manipulating them emotionally using that baggage.
Lori Drew did not know how Megan would react, no. That’s precisely my point - she could have known by virtue of the fact that their families were friends, they lived 3 houses away, and because she herself was engaging in an ongoing, intimate, personal series of exchanges with Megan by email and MySpace messaging. As the adult in the equation, it was her responsibility to ascertain the extent of her actions on Megan’s behavior, and she intentionally inflicted additional emotional distress on her.
Brian J. does have a point. My partner was discussing this online at the website he monitors for gaming online. Basically the main topic was ‘We are all gamers, we are always harrassing each other, how is this going to effect us?’
So I do see the viewpoint from both angles. The problem is that Lori Drew specifically set out to hurt a child that she knew had emotional problems in the first place.
Another thing with the internet is that if someone is continually harrassing you, there are ways to block them. Unfortunately, they can make numerous email addresses or screen names for whatever messaging program and take it up again. Megan didn’t expect to be harrassed by someone she thought was her boyfriend, which then in turn became everyone she considered her friends.
When someone is specifically setting out to hurt others, they should be punished, that’s all there is to it. Otherwise, parents can still be vigilant about what their children are doing on the internet and this includes reading their emails, logging their instant messages and keeping track of the websites they are visiting. It’s a pain, but if we are going to allow them access to the information highway, then we have to protect them any way we can.
Chelle, I do precisely that. My girls are fully aware that everything they do is subject to monitoring, and I keep the amount of information I’m privy to intentionally vague. Actually, I make a point of asking them questions I already know the answer to occasionally, just to reinforce the notion that Dad Knows Everything. I’ve been successful enough that the kids come to me if they come across something questionable immediately, so I think my efforts have borne fruit.
My oldest has been a victim of this kind of harassment, only it wasn’t coming from adults. She had accessed her account from somebody else’s computer, and they’d copied her keystrokes, got her password, and passed the information around. She was really upset at first, until I stepped in, started taking screen shots, immediately documenting everything, and in her presence putting together a folder of information about things. She is now quite a bit more cautious about her internet usage, and that’s a good thing.
There is a world of difference between gamers and geeks giving each other crap in and out of game, and an adult intentionally setting out to manipulate a child. Lori Drew is, in the end, going to get what’s coming to her - I’ve been following developments over at Death By 1000 Papercuts.
Chelle wrote “When someone is specifically setting out to hurt others, they should be punished, that’s all there is to it.”
I agree to a point, Chelle. The problem involves the question of intent. Lori Drew’s previous statements to law enforcement indicate that she didn’t specifically intend to cause physical harm to Megan, so that’s why the issue devolves into one about recklessness, as WG pointed out earlier.
As far as recklessness, the issue is whether Drew knew or should have known that Megan would kill herself after receiving those messages.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit since WG brought up the possibility of manslaughter charges, and one thing that dawned on me was a legal concept known as the eggshell skull doctrine.
In a nutshell, it means that a wrongdoer takes their victim as they find them: if they bop the person on the head with a pillow but, because person has a skull as thin as an eggshell, it proves to be a fatal blow, then the wrongdoer is STILL liable.
Although it can be used in criminal law, it’s mostly used in tort (civil) cases. In the criminal area, there seems to be a requirement that the initial action be unlawful.
The most commonly cited case for using this doctrine in criminal law involves a kid who kicked another. The victim had previously been injured and the kick exacerbated that prior injury so that the boy wound up losing his leg. The kicker was held criminally responsible for that loss since kicking another person is, in the first place, a crime of battery.
In the Megan Meiers case, there is NO law making it illegal for an adult to pose as a child on the internet (unless, of course, it involves other illegal acts). So perhaps that’s why prosecutors won’t be filing charges against Drew using the eggshell skull doctrine.
In a tort case, however, there’s no such requirement. The standards for filing a tort lawsuit based in negligence is:
- A duty of care
- Breach of that duty
- Breach causing harm in fact
- Breach being a proximate or not too remote a cause, in law
As for the duty of care, all people are required to exercise reasonable care that their actions do not cause foreseeable harm to others.
Proving a breach of duty requires the injured person to show that the wrongdoer failed to exercise reasonable care, i.e., that s/he knew or should have known the action could cause harm.
Breach of duty causing harm in fact means that the failure to exercise reasonable care must actually have caused harm. This is where the eggshell skull doctrine comes into play. In that case of the kid who kicked another, it was foreseeable that kicking could lead to a bruise when, in fact, it led to something worse. It’s sufficient to show that SOME kind of harm could occur, but there’s no requirement to show that the SPECIFIC harm was likely.
Breach being the proximate cause means proving that, but for the wrongdoer’s actions the harm would not have occurred. In the Drew case, that means showing that if Drew hadn’t sent hurtful messages to Megan, then Megan wouldn’t have tried to kill herself. That much seems rather obvious.
So, even though prosecutors can’t charge Drew with a crime, the Meiers’ family certainly has grounds for a civil lawsuit seeking tort damages.
The question is whether the satisfaction of hearing a jury pronounce Drew guilty will be enough reward, since it’s unlikely that any amount of money could compensate the family for their loss.
Oh, my. How awful am I for laughing out loud over some of the comments?
Stop having opinions!
Bawahahahaha.