Commentary5

Age: 16 

Sex: Male

Occupation: Impostor

Imagine you’re a parent calling for your child to come down stairs. You call repeatedly to no avail. You walk upstairs and knock on the door and still no answer.

When you open the door you witness a gruesome discovery. You find your thirteen year old child dangling in the closet from a belt around her neck.

Pain, hurt, frustration, and guilt comes crashing into your reality as you cant believe your eyes and wonder who or what is responsible for this travesty.

Your world comes crashing down in a mere matter of seconds as what started out as a routine check on your child turns into a nightmarish moment in time never to be forgotten. 

Megan Meier, unconscious in her room having hung herself in the closet with a belt. She died a day later.  Meier's mother, Tina Meier, told CNN in November that her daughter had “self-esteem issues and had struggled with depression since childhood”.

So enters Josh Evans. She met Josh Evans online on myspace.com and the two started a relationship. Josh Evans had made her more upbeat and she began to feel special. Imagine back to the first time you felt someone attractive or important was interested in you. I can remember as a youth, not having the most friends in elementary school and the girls I had crushes on made it a daily recess game of who would get chased by me, the monster.

Every now and then before recess I would get to serve lunch as a lunch helper and one day I took notice of a pretty girl everybody would be enchanted by. On one particular bad day I was having, as I was serving lunch, this girl, who was in a higher grade by the way, said, “You have pretty eyes”.

The lunch line stood still for the next five minutes as I recovered from shock. I never forgot the moment. It was a lunch changing experience. From that point on, she would just give me a gentle smile and although from time to time it would get me beat up by the older bullies who liked her, the pain was bearable because someone special had taken notice of me.

I can relate to how Megan Meier felt when things in her world weren’t going right and all of a sudden, the equivalent of a miracle happens and the bad stuff doesn’t hurt as much. 

Well, after a few weeks things went awry. Josh Evans started insulting her and not returning messages. She began to get frustrated and irritated as her mom recalls “"She was looking for me to help calm herself down like I always did and be there for her. And I was upset because I didn't like the language she was using, and I was angry she didn't sign off when I told her to," Tina Meier told CNN.” She said to me, 'You're supposed to be my mom, you're supposed to be on my side,' and then took off running upstairs," Tina Meier said.

Tina Meier found her daughter hanging by a belt shortly afterward.  The Boy, it turns out after an investigation, was actually 49 year old Lori Drew who made up a myspace.com profile posing as Josh Evans according to authorities to find out if Megan was saying bad things about her daughter.

Despite internet records, Lori Drew initially denied being the culprit. Until recently, Lori Drew hadn’t been charged because there were no laws on the books in that state that covered such a situation. Recently though after a careful strategy and campaigning on the part of Tina Meier, she has now been charged with conspiracy and accessing protected computers to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. 

I remember the African proverb saying, “it takes a village to raise a child” but as a wise woman by the name of L’Tonya Lemon once said, “where is the village?” We often tell our kids to use the internet responsibly and warn them that there are people out there that would do you harm but what happens when they read that the ones causing trouble could be us? 

Lori Drew stated that Megan was harassing her daughter. And she felt like this was the appropriate way to handle it. It was not only inappropriate, it was insane. So how do you handle a situation when a child you know is getting harassed?

Here are some tips if your child or a youth comes to you saying they are being harassed.

1.         Notify parents, teachers, or authorities if online harassment persists.

2.         Continue to monitor youth activities online. Ask questions pertaining to

            youth's online friends or bullies.

3.         Tell youth not to trust strangers they meet online. It’s very easy to

            misrepresent yourself on social network sites.

4.         Help youth understand that inappropriate language online can lead to

inappropriate actions offline.

The lesson that we take from this is that these are all still our children. You wouldn’t go online to take on a cyber bully no sooner than you should go to the playground and fight a recess bully. Though Lori Drew may have succeeded fooling Megan Meier in her myspace.com scheme, she won’t be so successful against a jury when they read her profile.

Name: Lori Drew

Age: 49

Sex: female

Occupation: Emotional Molester/Killer

Submitted by Mr. Wali

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