Manslaughter by text message

This chick got her boyfriend to commit suicide. Thousands of text messages involved. She sounds like a highly skilled psychopath. I'm having trouble though understanding the psychology here. Threats of self-harm drove the "mark" to commit suicide? Does that sound plausible? Surely there must have been more to this than that. Anyone have any ideas how this might have worked?

https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2019/ ... icide-case

He was young, had mental health issues he was probably in love with her. She used all of that against him to get him to kill himself. Sounds like he was borderline suicidal to begin with. I don’t understand why anyone would want to do this, there isn’t much to be gained unless it’s just to cause pain and misery to the family or maybe she got off on the control she had over him. It’s an unfortunate situation, too bad he didn’t beat her to death first

I agree that he must have already been at risk and she probably picked up on that. But what I don't understand are the mechanics, the process that she applied. So far all that is known from the media is that she threatened him with self-harm. So... what? She says she's going to kill herself if he doesn't kill himself first? And that's why he does it? I can't hardly imagine that that's how it worked.

I’m sure its more involved than that, And we might never know all of it but someone who is depressed and vulnerable is easily manipulated by someone he was so i intimate with.

morbid3 wrote:This chick got her boyfriend to commit suicide. Thousands of text messages involved. She sounds like a highly skilled psychopath. I'm having trouble though understanding the psychology here. Threats of self-harm drove the "mark" to commit suicide? Does that sound plausible? Surely there must have been more to this than that. Anyone have any ideas how this might have worked?

Easy. He was vulnerable and gullible and she took advantage of that. It doesn't take much skill to drive someone to suicide, especially if they already have that mindset, and it sounds like he did.

What she did doesn't necessarily make her a psychopath. We can't even read the text messages to see what context they're written in and what state of mind they were both in at the time. Sometimes what isn't being said says more than what is.

It's possible for someone to enourage someone to commit suicide because they care about them and believe suicide will help end their suffering. In this case though, there is talk of her abusing him psychologically. Again, without seeing the actual text messages we don't really know what was going on between them, so we can't really say much about it when we have only limited knowledge of the situation.

I guess we'll find out if and when the case goes to court. Never been suicidal myself so I have a hard time imagining this.

Didn't read the story, but intense emotional instability is not generally limited to just specific types of emotions. Perhaps he properly tormented her first.

Based on people who I have known to use self-harm and other threats as manipulation, I do not believe everyone realizes this is what they are doing in their open floodgate of emotion. Most who do it seem entirely off their rocker. Knew a woman who used to threaten suicide all of the time. From blowing her face off with a sawed-off shotgun to purposefully getting into a car wreck, and any time she reached this point, appeared batshit insane. This same woman was like a bulldog when ticked off, had no problem telling anyone to go off themselves, and even at her levels of insanity no one ever did. She was prone to long term harassment and stalking as well.

From that, it says quite a bit about the man himself to go take a leap to his death over one person. That can not be all there is.

He didn't jump off a building for her. He was obviously struggling with depression, and her words may have been what pushed him over the edge. Do you not understand the nature of depression? There doesn't need to be "something else."

I don't know, the whole texting thing adds a level of separation that's plain insidious, it's not outside the capability of anyone.

"She kept telling me to kill myself via text, so I did." He should have seen what this guy went through: https://youtu.be/9VDvgL58h_Y