They've hurt Carrie for the last time

“They've hurt Carrie for the last time” is a statement attributed to Susan Snell in testimony about Carrie White and the fires in Chamberlain. The phrase places a claim about Carrie’s actions beside a declaration that her mistreatment has reached a limit; its pronoun becomes significant when an examiner asks whether Susan said “They've” or “We've.”

Reported wording

Asked whether Carrie had something to do with the fires, the sheriff said Susan told him, “Carrie did it. Carrie did it.” He recalled that she repeated the assertion twice. Asked whether she said anything else, he answered that she had said, “They've hurt Carrie for the last time.” In this account, the phrase follows an attribution of the fires to Carrie and casts the disaster as the consequence of prior harm, though the testimony does not explain what Susan meant by “they.”

The pronoun under examination

The examination immediately tests the wording. The questioner asks the sheriff whether Susan might instead have said, “We've hurt Carrie for the last time.” That proposed change shifts the statement from blaming others to including the speaker in the group that hurt Carrie. The excerpt records the challenge, but not the sheriff’s answer to it; the alternative therefore remains a question, not an established correction to his account.

Susan Snell’s testimony

The phrase appears within sworn testimony by Susan Snell before the State Investigatory Board of Maine, reproduced from The White Commission Report. Elsewhere in that examination, the Board asks whether Susan heard Carrie at their alleged meeting. Susan answers no, then challenges the demand that she explain how she knew Carrie was there by asking how Thomas K. Quillan, Cora Simard, or Victor Mooney knew. When asked whether she had prior knowledge of Carrie White’s whereabouts, she denies it and calls the idea absurd. Her testimony thus exposes a tension between what witnesses claim to know and what they can identify as the basis for knowing it.

Function in the record

The phrase is preserved not as an unmediated scene but through questioning and recollection. A separate exchange asks Cora Simard how she knew it was Carrie White; she answers, “I just knew.” Another examiner asks whether she is personally sure Carrie White did it, and she says yes. These answers do not settle the exact wording attributed to Susan, but they place the phrase within a broader record where certainty, inference, and the source of knowledge are repeatedly tested. Its force lies partly in that unresolved distinction: whether Susan named others as responsible for Carrie’s suffering or included herself remains consequential, while the testimony supplied here does not resolve it.