Student reflects on Megan Meier suicide

One year ago, 13-year-old Megan Meier fashioned cloth around the support beam in her closet and hanged herself. She was driven to end her life by a tanked online relationship and the harrassing Internet messages of a boy named Josh Evans.

Meier parents later learned that Josh Evans didn't exist - that the Drews, a neighborhood family, had created him fictionally to get back at Megan for a dispute with their daughter.

Jake Meador, a sophomore English major at the University of Nebraska, continues the story and offers this reflection in a wonderful column at Daily Nebraskan:

The prankster was Lori Drew, who wanted to know what Megan was saying about her daughter.

When I first read this tragic story, my reaction was a mixture of numbness, anger, terrible grief and abject horror at the behavior of Lori Drew. Drew is not being prosecuted because the state of Missouri has no law under which she can be charged.

That's a gross injustice, and it's something that needs to be changed. But it's not what strikes me most about this story. The thing that breaks my heart about this story is the utter loneliness of it all.

There's a lonely 13-year-old girl with a broken heart, and there's a lonely 40-something woman so insecure that she created a MySpace account to find out what others were saying about her daughter. There are Megan's parents, who are now getting a divorce. . .

The most basic lesson we can take from the tragic story of Megan Meier is that loneliness kills - sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively, but it always kills.

As our nation is outraged we are again remined that the union of loneliness and pain has volatile power when encouraged by evil.