His name was Josh Evans. He was 16 years old. And he was hot.
"Mom! Mom! Mom! Look at him!" Tina Meier recalls her daughter saying.
Josh had contacted Megan Meier through her MySpace page and wanted to be added as a friend.
Yes, he’s cute, Tina Meier told her daughter. "Do you know who he is?"
"No, but look at him! He’s hot! Please, please, can I add him?" Mom said yes.
And for six weeks Megan and Josh – under Tina’s watchful eye – became acquainted in the virtual world of MySpace.
….Megan went to her room and Ron went downstairs to the kitchen, where he and Tina talked about what had happened, the MySpace account, and made dinner.
Twenty minutes later, Tina suddenly froze in mid-sentence.
"I had this God-awful feeling and I ran up into her room and she had hung herself in the closet."
Megan Taylor Meier died the next day, three weeks before her 14th birthday.
Later that day, Ron opened his daughter’s MySpace account and viewed what he believes to be the final message Megan saw – one the FBI would be unable to retrieve from the hard drive.
It was from Josh and, according to Ron’s best recollection, it said, "Everybody in O’Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you."
Megan Taylor Meier was a typical 13-year-old girl fighting off self-esteem, ADD, and body image demons. She killed herself on October 16th, 2006, after being rejected and insulted by Josh Evans, one of her cute new friends on MySpace. Unfortunately for Megan, Josh was nothing but a fabrication created by evil neighborhood helicopter mom Lori Drew.
The full story broke in the September 11th issue of the St. Charles Journal, and proves once and for all that the Internets is serious business.
This blog names the person who pulled this cruel hoax — Lori Drew who seems to be unrepentent.
Here’s a sample comment to that blog: "Interviews with others at various news sources are revealing that the people who did this are showing no remorse at all for the results. They knew what they were doing, and they WANTED this result. This was not malicious teasing, it was no different than standing on the edge of a building and pushing the potential jumper off the edge. If a person is not suicidal, and someone else abuses them psychologically to the point that suggesting suicide results in that persons death, it is murder."
Media blogger Jim Romenesko posts: "The Lee-owned St. Charles Journal recently wrote about a teenage girl who killed herself after two adults’ postings on MySpace. The paper declined to name the pair, but blogs outed them. The Lee paper was criticized for its editorial decision, with one newspaper employee writing on Jezebel.com: "Every day newspaper journalism as we know it gets one step closer to death, as readers turn to blogs and TV and other media for information. This wimp of an editor, who doesn’t have the guts to name the wrongdoers involved, has just hastened our eventual demise by at least another week or two.""
Here’s a follow-up news report:
Dardenne Prairie officials Wednesday night told a couple who lost a daughter to suicide last year that they will pass a law to make cyberspace harassment a crime in this city of 7,000 and will also pass a resolution next week to encourage the state Legislature to address the problem.
"I cannot sit here and do nothing," said Mayor Pam Fogarty. "It is not in my nature."
Fogarty and the city’s six aldermen were responding to a Sunday story in the Suburban Journal about Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl who killed herself Oct. 17, 2006. Megan took her life after a boy named Josh Evans had befriended her on MySpace, an on-line social network, and suddenly was mean to her. The story has received national attention. The Meiers are scheduled to be interviewed by CNN Thursday afternoon.
Six weeks after Megan’s death, parents Ron and Tina Meier, who live in Dardenne Prairie, discovered that Josh Evans never existed and, instead, was created by a woman who lives down the street. The neighbor’s daughter had been a friend of Megan’s but the girls had a falling out.
…The woman who created the fake MySpace page called police and filed a report Nov. 25, 2006, after the Meiers destroyed a foosball table they had been storing in their garage for the family down the street. The Meiers destroyed it on the day they learned the neighbor had created the phony Josh Evans account.
In that police report, the woman down the street told a sheriff’s deputy she created the MySpace page to see what Megan was saying about her daughter. She also said the account was monitored by her, her daughter and an 18-year-old part-time employee.
The neighbor, when contacted by the Journal last week, disputed the accuracy of that police report. She has not been charged and is not being sued.
Megan had gone on vacations with this other family and they knew Megan battled depression, according to Tina Meier.
