Boy, 14, obsessed with the dark web hanged himself
AN AUTISTIC boy fascinated by the ‘dark web’ was found hanged after he warned teachers he planned to carry out a massacre, an inquest heard yesterday.
Stephen Mortimer, 14, went online to research classroom killings, including the 1996 Dunblane massacre.
He then alarmed classmates by telling them about the attacks, saying he planned to bring a gun into school to ‘kill people’, the hearing was told.
Despite his parents’ efforts to cut down his computer time, Stephen’s obsession with the hidden corners of the internet only deepened.
He told a member of staff at the 1,700-pupil Ripley St Thomas Church of England Academy in Lancaster: ‘My mind is in a state of hatred which can’t be repaired. Other people think it can be fixed, but it can’t.’
Stephen was excluded for five days due to fears for the safety of staff and pupils and he was subsequently withdrawn from the school by his family. He transferred to another school but was found dead in January in the back garden of the family’s £480,000 home in the village of Calder Vale. Yesterday a coroner said he couldn’t be sure Stephen had intended to kill himself.
The ‘dark web’ is an encrypted corner of the internet which can be accessed only with software that renders users anonymous, it acts like a criminal eBay as well as a potential haven for terrorists.
Stephen’s teachers in Year 9 had become alarmed when he began to talk of harming himself or buying a gun over the ‘dark web’, the inquest in Lancaster was told.
‘He stated he would bring a gun and a knife into school and kill people,’ principal Liz Nicholls said. ‘ The school was very, very alarmed by his behaviour.’
Stephen’s autism consultant, Lynn McCann, said: ‘We talked a lot about the dark web. He was confused about life.’ Stephen’s father Andrew, 53, an engineer, described his son as ‘intelligent, funny, articulately bright’ but said he felt he had suffered from ‘a clash of personalities’ with some of his teachers, adding ‘some people got him and some people didn’t’.
Giving a narrative conclusion, coroner Richard Taylor said he couldn’t be sure ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that Stephen had intended to kill himself.
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