A cyber bullying that took a young life

LOS ANGELES, USA: "The world would be a better place without you. Have a shitty rest of your life," wrote the ‘boy’ she met at networking site MySpace.

"You are the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over..." replied a depressed Megan Meier, the 13-year-old teenager from Missouri who began this online affair taking it for romance.

And that’s what she did on October 17, 2006. She hanged herself with a belt and escaped the cyber bullying forever.

She never knew the ‘boy’ who taunted her was actually a mom who lived a few houses away.

As the trial in the first-ever cyber bullying, suicide case began, the prosecutors in the case said the federal court that the suicide of the Missouri teen could have been avoided had she not been tormented online by the woman.

The case says that Lori Drew, 49, a resident of Missouri, fraudulently used the social networking site to pose as a teenage boy who feigned romantic interest in Megan Meier.

The prosecutors said Drew and others allegedly created an account on MySpace under the name "Josh Evans" and used that account to contact Meier, who thought it was an online romance with a 16-year-old boy.

However, Drew, her daughter and a teenage employee created the profile in a plan to publicly embarrass Meier and get back at her for saying bad things about Drew's daughter, the indictment says.

She is charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on Meier.

The prosecution said that Drew violated MySpace's terms of service by using a fraudulent information to obtain personal information about a juvenile, with the intention to "harass, abuse or harm other members".

Drew faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison if she is convicted on all of the charges. However, her lawyers termed the allegation against her as absurd.

Since this is the first case of this type the social networking industry is closely watching the trial.