Witness admits deadly online prank

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 21 (UPI) -- A young woman testified about posing as a teenage boy in a series of e-mail messages that ended in a 13-year-old girl's suicide, officials said.

"You're the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over," Ashley Grills, 20, told a Los Angeles federal court jury during testimony about what Megan Meier wrote before taking her own life at her suburban St. Louis home in 2006.

Grills, testifying under an immunity agreement, admitted she came up with the idea to create a fake MySpace account with the identity of a cute teenage boy and not her employer, Lori Drew, on trial in connection with the death.

The goal, she said, was to learn what Meier might have been saying about Drew's teenage daughter.

Drew, a neighbor of the dead girl, is charged with conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization in interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress.

Grills described how Drew had become angry with Megan for "spreading lies" about her daughter, Sarah, and was eager to "expose" her. The original idea was to lure Megan to make nasty remarks about Sarah, but soon developed into other methods of humiliating the girl, devised by Drew, she said.

Legal experts believe the trial is an unprecedented use of computer fraud statutes in a case involving the use of a social networking site.

The trial is in Los Angeles where MySpace is based.