DNY59/iStockBy EMILY SHAPIRO, ABC News
(OSHKOSH, Wis.) — Anissa Weier, one of the two 12-year-old girls who said they attacked a friend to please the fictional character “Slender Man,” is asking for conditional release from her mental health facility.
In 2014, Weier and Morgan Geyser lured Payton Leutner, also 12, to the woods in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where Geyser stabbed Leutner 19 times while Weier watched. Leutner was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries but survived.
At a Wednesday court hearing, Judge Michael Bohren reviewed several medical reports and a letter written by Weier.
Weier, now 19, wrote in the letter, “I have exhausted all the resources available to me at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. If I am to become a productive member of society, I need to be a part of society.”
In 2017 Weier was sentenced to up to 25 years in a mental institution.
Weier said she’s taken the responsibility that comes with “living with a mental illness, by communicating with total transparency to my treatment team members, participating wholeheartedly in all aspects of my treatment, and maintaining 100% medication adherence.”
“I am sorry and deeply regretful for the agony, pain, and fear I have caused,” Weier wrote, adding, “I take full responsibility for my actions.”
“I vowed after my crime that I would never become a weapon again, and I intend to keep that vow,” she said.
Weier has returned to Winnebago Mental Health Institution until a decision is made on her release. Her next court date is June 11.
Leutner’s family was in court on Wednesday but didn’t comment, ABC affiliate WISN reported.
Geyser and Weier were charged in adult court with first-degree attempted intentional homicide. Weier pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was found by a jury to be not guilty by mental disease or defect. Geyser pleaded guilty to the first-degree charges, and in 2018, as a part of her plea agreement, Geyser was convicted but found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
Geyser was sentenced to up to 40 years in a mental institution. Last year a state appeals court upheld her sentence.
Geyser and Weier said they had intended to kill Leutner to appease the fictional character “Slender Man” — often depicted online as a horror figure who stalks children — and prove that he was real.
After Geyser stabbed Leutner, she and Weier left Leutner alone in the woods. Injured and bleeding, Leutner pulled herself out of the woods and into the open where someone could find her.
“If the knife had gone the width of a human hair further, she wouldn’t have lived,” Dr. John Kelemen, who operated on Leutner that day, told ABC News in 2014.
In a 2019 interview, Leutner told ABC News she was doing well and that her hope was to “put everything behind me and live my life normally.”
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