Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Amber cried out for help.. nobody listened to her
GRAN’S HEARTACHE OVER GIRL WHO TOOK HER LIFE
IT is the last gift her granddaughter gave her on the final day she saw her alive. And Jennifer Lancaster keeps it safe in a trinket box of memories.
A Mother’s Day card from a tragic, troubled girl whose harrowing life was last week laid bare in a coroner’s court.
Two years after that fleeting visit to her gran, Amber Peat was found hanged after running away from the last of the 11 homes her parents had moved her to. She was just 13.
On Friday coroner Laurinda Bower returned a narrative conclusion on the youngster’s death, saying she could not be sure she intended to commit suicide.
But she blasted education, health and social care agencies in two counties for missing 11 chances to save the tormented child.
And she panned the girl’s mum and stepdad for showing “very little, if any, consideration” for her welfare.
“This is proof the authorities failed Amber,” says a tearful Jennifer, 69, tenderly touching that treasured card. “She was let down by everyone. But it doesn’t change the outcome does it? Amber was a little girl crying out for help and nobody listened. How must she have been feeling in those final moments?
“I’m sure she would have opened up to me if she hadn’t been forced to move away.”
PUNISHMENTS
The inquest heard allegations that Amber – whose body was found in a hedgerow near her home – suffered emotional abuse, and that her stepdad Danny “humiliated” her and gave her “severe punishments”.
A teacher claimed the Cinderella schoolgirl told her the family’s dog was treated better than her. A policewoman told the court her mum Kelly dismissed her disappearance as just “attention seeking”.
Today, her gran reveals how Kelly banned her from seeing Amber after that last visit on Mother’s Day, 2013. Jennifer’s son Adrian, 43 – Amber’s real dad – had split from Kelly in Christmas 2012 after a turbulent 12-year relationship.
He has a conviction for domestic violence against her.
“He’s no angel,” says Jennifer. “But there’s no excuse for Kelly to have stopped Amber’s contact with me. It was cold and cruel.
“Amber said she couldn’t stay long that day as her mum and Danny were waiting in the car.
“I texted Kelly a couple of weeks later to ask if I could see her. I got a reply saying she wasn’t sure, then the whole family just up and left. When I called Kelly’s number she’d changed it.
“Her old neighbours had no idea where they’d gone. My heart was broken. Amber was so loving. She spent weekends with me and every time she went home she’d leave notes saying things like ‘love you, Nanna’.” Jennifer was at the inquest every day, hoping to make sense of what happened.
“I owed it to Amber,” she says.
Nottingham Coroner’s Court heard how Amber had moved house “no less than 11 times” around Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. And social services in Derbyshire were already involved with the Peat family when they moved to Mansfield, Notts, in 2014.
When Amber started the local Queen Elizabeth school, staff there quickly grew worried.
She told teachers her stepdad Danny would wake her at 11.30pm to clean floors for two hours as punishment for failing to do chores.
She said he made her wear baggy grey jogging bottoms to school and carry her belongings in a plastic bag instead of a satchel or backpack to humiliate her. He denied it.
Form teacher Rebecca Beard told the inquest: “Amber said her dad wanted to get everyone to laugh at her.” The distraught schoolgirl told
another teacher – after briefly running away from home in April 2014 – that the family dog was treated better than her.
Six months before her death she told pupils: “I hate my life. I want to kill myself.”
Teachers twice tipped off Nottinghamshire social workers but were told that her case did not “cross the threshold” for intervention.
Coroner Bower said Amber’s tragic death highlighted the lack of sharing of information between agencies in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
She said: “No one got to the point of how Amber was feeling because there was not that support in place.” Amber, who had two siblings, was found dead in June 2015 after a row over cleaning a cool box after a family holiday in Cornwall.
Kelly, 37, and Danny, 34, denied all allegations made at the inquest. They did not deny that it was almost eight hours before they reported Amber missing, after going shopping, out for dinner and to a carwash.
Now Jennifer, who lives in Nottinghamshire, is left with that trinket box and a conviction that more could have been done to save her granddaughter.
“How could Amber’s cries for help have gone unheard?” she says. “People will say ‘lessons have been learned’ but it won’t bring her back.” She is surrounded by pictures of Amber – as a baby, as a threeyear-old playing by a duck pond, as a young girl nearing teens, posing elegantly.
Jennifer shows me a Christmas decoration Amber made from lollipop sticks. All the time she holds a green stone keyring Amber gave her.
“It’s only a cheap thing she won at a fair, but it means everything to me. It’s one of the few things I have left of her.” Jennifer says.
Amber harboured dreams of being a model. “She loved having her picture taken and every time she came she’d get my make-up out to do herself up.”
But the vulnerable girl also yearned for her lost childhood.
A youth worker who had sessions with Amber told the inquest her mother “laughed” at a letter her vulnerable daughter wrote saying she just wanted to be a little girl again. After the
Everyone let her down. How must she have felt in the final moments of her life? GRAN JENNIFER ON FAILURES THAT LED TO AMBER’S SUICIDE
inquest verdict on Friday, Kelly said she had been had been “the best parent” she could. Jennifer says: “Amber did everything she could to get help. She spoke to teachers, wrote to her mum, had youth worker sessions yet despite all of this a house move meant she fell off the radar.” All Jennifer has left now is the memory of that last big hug before Amber left that Mother’s Day, out of her life forever. “I think about her from when I wake until I close my eyes. I have happy dreams in which I believe she comes to visit me. “I like to think it means Amber is finally at peace.”