TEEN DIDN’T MEAN TO DIE, INQUEST TOLD
ADEVASTATED mum who came home with a McDonald’s for her 13-year-old daughter but found her dead told a coroner she believed the teen hadn’t meant to die and it had been a “cry for help.”
Alison Jones had jokingly shouted “waitress service” as she went to Chantelle Jones’s bedroom in Llay New Road, Wrexham, and made the awful discovery last October, an inquest heard.
“I know I will never get the answers I want as to why I lost the most precious thing in my life. She was just a teenager getting on with her life and doing what all teenagers do,” Mrs Jones said in a statement read at the Ruthin hearing. “We had a close relationship and she knew she could come to me and her dad and talk about anything.”
The distraught mother told the coroner: “I just don’t think she meant to do it. I think it was a cry for help and she thought we would be there.”
Mrs Jones said she still had a text message from her daughter, received as she waited for takeaway food, saying a curtain pole had come down.
John Gittins, senior coroner for North Wales East and Central, recorded a conclusion of misadventure. He noted that he had dealt with two inquests on the same day involving children who died and involving misadventure.
Mr Gittins said: “We have a deliberate act with unforeseen consequences arising from it.” He told Chantelle’s parents: “I just wish I knew what she had in her mind so you could have proper closure.
It doesn’t seem enough to offer my condolences.”
He added: “Everyone involved in this did all they possibly could. It’s very, very sad.”
Chantelle was an only child and loved going to school and her language lessons, the inquest heard. She wanted to join the Army and become a nurse and joined the Army cadets, Mrs Jones said.
The coroner said in 2019 Chantelle had been referred to a mental health service after self-harming but the contact was only for a week. She hadn’t harmed herself since.
Alex Jones, her dad, also thought what happened last October was a cry for help.
Mr Gittins told the parents: “She had a lot going for her, a family who loved her, and had all the support in the world from you in relation to that.”
He said the self-harming in 2019 seemed to be “isolated” and hadn’t been repeated. She knew her parents were coming home with food and texted her mother about the curtain rail.
“There’s not sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion of suicide,” Mr Gittins declared. “My belief is it wasn’t intended to end her life.”
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