Conrad Roy's Family Breaks Silence After Michelle Carter's Sentencing

The family of Conrad Roy III spoke out following Michelle Carter's sentence Thursday, revealing their shock and awe that the young woman accused of urging Roy to kill himself would walk free this week. Carter was sentenced to two and a half years, 15 months of which she would serve behind bars, but was allowed to leave with her family Thursday pending appeals.

Roy's mother said in an interview with "48 Hours" that the case will never end for her and her family.

"We want to put it past us," she said. "We want to move on. Best way we can."

Carter, 20, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after a contentious trial revealed hundreds of text messages in which she urged her boyfriend to take his own life. "Hang yourself, jump off a building, stab yourself... there's a lot of ways," she wrote in one text. At various points, she told Roy his parents would get over his death and expressed frustration that he hadn't killed himself yet.

In other evidence presented during the trial, the prosecution introduced YouTube videos Roy recorded of himself discussing his own depression and anxiety. In one video, he called himself "a minuscule little particle on the face of this earth... no good, trash" and said he would "never be successful, never have a life, never have kids, never learn."

"Michelle Carter exposed my son's weaknesses and used him as a pawn," Roy's father said. "Where was her humanity?"

Roy's cousin, Makenna O'Donnell, told "Good Morning America" Thursday she was sickened by the fact that Carter would walk free, at least for now.

"I was just sick," O'Donnell said. "Just sick to my stomach... the fact that she can be free, and my cousin, he's not here. She should be behind bars."

Roy took his own life in 2014 when he was 18 by attaching a portable generator to his pickup truck. Prosecutors showed evidence at the trial asserting Roy got scared at one point during his suicide and attempted to get out of the truck. Carter, who was on the phone with him at the time, told him to "get back in."

"I just don't understand how someone can be free knowing she deliberately told him to get back in the car and she gets to sleep in her own bed tonight. She gets to eat breakfast. She gets to wake up with her family. Meanwhile, where's Conrad?" O'Donnell said. "No normal human being who doesn't have problems would tell someone to get back in a truck where it is a toxic environment. I do believe she needs help and I do believe she needs to take responsibility for her actions."

Other family members spoke out prior to Carter's sentencing Thursday. Roy's aunt, Kim Bozzi, said Carter should be "kept far away from society" and that the judge should sentence her to 20 years to "take away the spotlight that she so desperately craved."

"I'm unsure when she decided to set her sick plan into motion or why," Bozzi said in a victim impact statement given to the Boston Herald. "But when she did, she did it relentlessly. It was calculated and it was planned down to a T. She preyed on his vulnerabilities. He trusted her, which in turn, cost him his life."

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