This is a story that is all to familiar with Juvenile Investigators. The following are excerpts from an article that was published on www.twincities.com. See the suggestions for parents and children after the article.

She was elated when the boy asked her to go steady. He told her he loved her in text messages, for that is how some young people today prefer to communicate feelings rather than face to face. And for the first month, Michaela Snyder, then a seventh-grader at Lake Middle School in Woodbury, was walking on air.

Then things gradually changed.

The boy asked her one day to send him a “selfie” from the torso up wearing just a bra. She thought it unusual, but she complied. After he suggested she was fat, she developed bulimia. When she refused once to send more pictures, he texted that she was already a slut and that it would not matter anymore.

What began as a typical middle-school dating relationship quickly degenerated into sexual manipulation as Michaela, in order to please the boy, reluctantly sent more sexually provocative pictures of herself.

“My circle of friends said they all did it,” the now-15-year-old high school freshman told me this week as we chatted at a St. Paul coffee shop, her father by her side. “They didn’t think anything of it. I felt bad about it, but I did not want to lose him.”

But after her stepmother checked her cellphone and found the pictures she had sent him, Michaela became the subject of a bullying campaign by her so-called friends and others to the point where she fell into a deep depression and thought of taking her life.

If you think this could not happen to your child, consider that Michaela is the daughter of Grant Snyder, a veteran Minneapolis police sergeant in the crimes against children unit who has ...