A federal grand jury has indicted a woman for allegedly creating a hoax on the online social network MySpace which ended in a 13-year-old girl's suicide in 2006.

Lori Drew of St. Louis, Mo., is accused of helping to fabricate a false-identity account on MySpace for the purpose of contacting a neighbor girl, Megan Meier, a friend of her daughter.

Megan, 13, thought she was talking to a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. But Josh was a made-up identity.

After receiving cruel messages from "Josh," Megan hanged herself at home. One of the messages said that the world would be better off without her.

The indictment charges that Ms. Drew, 48 at the time of the incident, and her accomplices "used the information obtained over the MySpace computer system to torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass the juvenile MySpace member."

Ms. Drew was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization in order to cause the girl emotional distress. The accused woman will be arraigned in St. Louis but tried in Los Angeles.

U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien said that this was the first time the federal law on accessing protected computers has been used in a social-networking case. Both the girl and MySpace are named as victims in the case.

Salvador Hernandez, assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, said: "The Internet is a world unto itself. People must know how far they can go before they must stop. They exploited a young girl's weaknesses. Whether the defendant could have foreseen the results, she's responsible for her actions."

Hopefully the truth will come out in the trial and justice will be done. But there are larger lessons to be learned about policing the Internet and protecting the young and vulnerable from cyberbullying.

This is a tragedy that could have been avoided.