‘The US state department saw my son as collateral damage’

The mother of Harry Dunn, who was killed in a hit-and-run, on her fight for justice and the pain caused by bungling police. By Louise Carpenter

It’s been almost five years since Harry Dunn was knocked off his motorbike and killed by Anne Sacoolas, a CIA employee stationed at the Croughton military base in Northamptonshire, who ploughed into him coming over the brow of a hill, driving on the wrong side of the road.

Harry’s body had been totally shattered by the impact with Sacoolas’s car on August 27 2019. It was still warm when Charlotte Charles kissed her son goodbye, in the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, promising him justice. She had almost died giving birth to him and Niall, Harry’s twin, in that same hospital 19 years earlier: “I had a feeling in the hospital that my life had been saved there. Harry’s hadn’t,” she says when we meet today.

Shortly before the crash, she’d passed Harry on his motorbike on the road as she returned from work in the nearby GP surgery, where she had worked for 15 years and had stayed late finishing some tasks: “He flashed his lights at me and I waved. It was the last time I saw him alive. Even now, I can’t get beyond the feeling that if I hadn’t stayed late at work, I’d have got home and chatted to him in the garden, stalling the time he left, preventing him from ever meeting Sacoolas on the road. I’ve never been able to go back to that job as a result.”

In the aftermath of the crash, Harry had screamed to his father, Tim, who had arrived on the scene, called by a firefighter’s wife whose husband had recognised Harry, that he did not want to die. He had profound internal bleeding and compound fractures. Tim called Charlotte. She was brushing her teeth. She rushed to the crash scene and followed the ambulance: “I knew I’d lost him then, I don’t know how I knew but I did. It was a mother’s instinct.”

Today, I am sitting with Charlotte in the village of Charlton, in

Northamptonshire. RAF Croughton, a US base housing operatives of the CIA (of which Sacoolas’s husband was one), is just down the road. We are in the home of Radd Seiger, a neighbour and retired American lawyer, the equivalent of the postmasters’ Mr Bates in this extraordinary story of how ordinary people took on the UK and US governments and triumphed.

Sacoolas had killed Harry Dunn on August 27. By September 15, she was secretly flown out of the UK under the cloak of diplomatic immunity, evading, it seemed then, any chance of justice in the British courts. “What happened made me ashamed to be an American,” Seiger says.

It was a gift from God that Seiger lived in Harry Dunn’s village, along with the Sky News journalist who lived opposite, who broke the story and got the world’s media on board. “Suddenly Dominic Raab [the then foreign secretary] started to take my calls,” remembers Seiger. It quickly became all about the optics.

“We had said to Northants police, ‘We need some help with publicity. Will you put us in touch with your press office?’” says Charlotte. “They came back to us with a sentence or two that wasn’t even worthy of the local community chat page, let alone a local newspaper. We were flabbergasted. We were instantly very aware we were on the back foot here. The police were not going to help us. There was no way anybody was going to let my son down – that fire in my tummy, the police poured petrol on it.”

Harry’s funeral on September 18 was marred by rumours that Sacoolas was no longer in the UK. “We are a small community,” Charlotte explains. “Two people were brave enough to say to me ‘You do know she’s gone?’ I couldn’t take it in.”

Northamptonshire Police knew of the departure on September 15. They arranged a meeting with the family on the 26th: “Why didn’t they tell us?” she says, “To not spoil the funeral? The funeral was marred by rumour.”

On September 26, an officer sat at Charlotte’s kitchen table: “She said you have less than a 1 per cent chance of getting justice. She was effectively saying ‘give it up’.

“How dare they sit in my kitchen and tell me that justice for my son’s death was not worth fighting for,” says Charlotte. “I wasn’t having it. There is something basic in our society which is that you get justice when the worst happens. And somebody saying to me that my son’s life didn’t matter? That was injustice.”

Two days later Seiger came on board the Justice4Harry campaign. The police had been told by the Foreign Office to keep quiet. This decision has since come back to haunt Northamptonshire Police, which is now undergoing a formal review of how it handled the death of Harry Dunn.

Charlotte has the same very blonde hair as back in 2019, now pink at the roots. She is small, wearing a black frock coat with a purple lining, and has tattoos inked onto her feet and ankles. She is softly spoken with kind, huge blue eyes, but she seems fragile.

Seiger, by contrast, is a large tall man who is nothing short of a legal rottweiler. It was he who harnessed the family’s grief and deep sense of injustice and ploughed through US and UK diplomatic obstacles, including securing the family face-time with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. They were the first foreign non-dignitaries to ever be invited there.

Charlotte lives down the road with her husband Bruce and, until recently, Harry’s twin Niall, who had to move home after the crash, unable to live in his own house share, so close to where his twin had died (Harry was returning from visiting him when he was killed). Harry’s parents have been married to their respective partners for 20 years, having broken up amicably when the twins were 13 months old. Tim Dunn lives nearby with his wife: “We have always been a united force,” says Charlotte, “four very strong parents who had the same ethics and jointly raised Harry and Niall.”

Back at the end of 2019, when they had travelled to meet President Trump at the White House – their aim to persuade him to waive Sacoolas’s diplomatic immunity – Trump tried to ambush the family with Sacoolas in a room next door. There was an official willing to write a cheque, as if money might be a resolution in the absence of justice, after which the family could embrace Sacoolas for the international press. They refused to meet her: “What happened made me embarrassed to be an American,” says Seiger. “It was a case of America first, screw the consequences. From the start, America only wanted to protect its CIA ‘assets’.”

“We are a very normal working class family who lived simply by the values of right and wrong,” explains Charlotte, “I didn’t have the emotional resources to be anybody other than who I was. I didn’t even know what the Oval Office was. I just saw a lot of chairs and sofas and an orange man who looked like he wore a wig.” The family is not highly educated or well connected in the traditional sense – although all the powerful connections they needed were in their small village of Charlton. Charlotte has never been without empathy for Sacoolas’s situation: “I understood she was a mother of three. I never wanted to separate her from her children. I explained to the police that I was willing to work with them to find a decent resolution.

“I would have met her if the setting was right. I would have gone through restorative justice. But it fell on deaf ears.”

Justice was ultimately achieved for Harry Dunn at the end of 2022, when, using Covid legislation, Anne Sacoolas appeared remotely from the US, and pleaded guilty to causing death by careless driving. She was the first foreign citizen to appear in a British court remotely. She was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment, suspended for 12 months and banned from driving for a year. The family broke what had been a diplomatic stalemate only when Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, and Charlotte appealed to him directly as a fellow parent who had also lost a child in a road traffic accident.

The US government had never had any intention of waiving Sacoolas’s diplomatic immunity: “The US state department saw us as collateral damage,” says Charlotte. “It didn’t care about us or Harry. But I wasn’t going to be told that my son’s life didn’t matter, my precious boy who was everything to me.”

According to Andrea Leadsom, Charlotte’s local MP, the US ambassador at the time, Woody Johnson, told her “there are bigger things for us to worry about than Harry Dunn”. As Seiger recalls: “That’s when I got my fists out. I thought ‘Right, you want to go to war boys? Let’s go.’ The US state department couldn’t believe that anyone had the audacity to challenge it, let alone with the force that we managed to deliver.”

During the past year, Charlotte and the rest of Harry’s family had begun to heal: “The sense of justice in 2022 had brought me so much peace. I woke up the first morning afterwards feeling different. Every day since losing Harry I’d either woken up to be sick or had felt sick. It had gone away overnight after Sacoolas was convicted. I’d fulfilled my promise to Harry.

“I was trying to get my body back in shape through exercise, Bruce had started his own gardening business, and we had begun to visit places from Harry and Niall’s childhood that meant so much to us.”

But now there has been yet another distressing development to the story which has left Charlotte in almost as bad a mental state as she was at the start. This has come as a result of the family’s preparations for Harry’s inquest, finally scheduled for this June.

Soon after Harry’s death in 2019, Charlotte had asked after her son’s possessions, but had been led to believe by Northamptonshire police that everything had been destroyed in the crash. At the end of last year, feeling stronger, she had asked to be looped into correspondence about the upcoming inquest. In an email, she had seen an almost incidental reference to “possessions” in deep freeze.

These possessions included jeans and boxer shorts. His helmet appeared when the family asked, and a bank card was found in the back pocket of the jeans. But during the defrosting of these items, human remains were discovered on the clothes.

“When you bury your child for the first time, you assume you have put them at peace. So then to learn that there is more of them left? A substantial amount? It was devastating. I didn’t care how much or how little it was, if these tissues exist, I couldn’t feel I had laid Harry to rest.” She begins to cry: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says.

Three days ago, the family went through a second cremation for Harry, at the same Banbury Crematorium as in 2019.

“I’m back on antidepressants,” she says. “I haven’t been sleeping. I can’t trust myself to drive a car. I’m broken again. Harry’s twin is broken. Tim is not the same. My mum cannot say Harry’s name without crying and neither can Tim’s mother.”

The discovery of the possessions came at the very moment Charlotte was feeling so much stronger. As a result, the family has filed a formal complaint against Northamptonshire Police, informed not only by this recent trauma but also by how events had played out in 2019, when they were kept in the dark about Sacoolas’s return to the US: “No one told us about our right under the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime that we were entitled to appoint a spokesperson to deal with the authorities on our behalf.

“How are we only finding out his possessions now? I’d have waited 20 years to get them back. If only the police had told me from day one, it would have given me something else to cling to. I didn’t get to Harry soon enough the night he died, and was so desperate to lay my fingertips on material that had been next to him. It’s like the bottom has fallen out of my world again. I see this as the police’s carelessness towards how I feel as Harry’s mother.”

Charlotte seems so reduced by this setback, so unlike the fierce woman who won over the British and American public: “This woman who has conquered governments, who has been so strong and resilient for years, it’s like she has been hit by a sledgehammer,” says Seiger.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” says Charlotte, “nor functioning during the day. The idea of not having set the whole of Harry free was the most unsettling thing ever. But if I try to look for positives, while there is no way you’d choose a second cremation, the first was so marred by rumours about Sacoolas’s departure. At least I knew there were no more blows coming to us.”

The discovery of the possessions has opened old wounds regarding the police: “We had deep mistrust from the start, as soon as we found out they hadn’t told us about Sacoolas going.”

Northamptonshire Police currently has an Acting Chief Constable, Ivan Balhatchet. Chief Constable Nick Adderley, the force’s most senior officer who oversaw the Dunn case, has been suspended from duty following an investigation by the Independent

Office for Police Conduct. This suspension is for allegedly misrepresenting his military service on his CV.

Both the force and Adderley’s role in the Dunn case are now under formal review, commissioned by Acting Chief Constable Ivan Balhatchet, to be overseen by Detective Chief Superintendent Emma James.

On Monday Charlotte will meet with Detective Chief Superintendent James. She has already admitted, before the review, that “this was an extremely complex case from which we know there will be some learning for the force… We also [want to] reassure the family that whatever recommendations come out in the learning will be shared with the family and enacted.”

Justice4Harry has always been a three-pronged campaign. The first, getting Sacoolas’s conviction, has been achieved. The second, closing up the legal loophole enabling Sacoolas’s diplomatic immunity, has also been achieved. But the family also now wants to prevent any other family who are the victims of serious crime from having to endure police obfuscation, from feeling like their emotions are not the top priority of the investigating team: “Nobody should go through what we did. I want to make a difference for families down the line in terms of how the police approach victims of serious crime.

“I felt shame at various times,” says Charlotte, “because while I was doing it for Harry, I was also doing it for everybody else and when it looked like we were getting nowhere, I felt like I was letting everybody else down too.”

There is a third aim of Justice4Harry, which will be addressed in the upcoming inquest. Seiger explains: “We want road safety outside US bases in the UK to be reviewed and improved for the benefit of UK residents and American visitors.”

Messages of support continue to flood in. Seiger too has had many requests to help with miscarriages of justice. He says: “Now I just want to get the family to a point where they can say to Harry, ‘We did our best, we love you, but we’re getting on with our lives now’.”

“It’s difficult to look past the inquest,” Charlotte adds. “But I’m concentrating on making sure Niall is OK. Spending time with my family. Harry was always one for living in the moment. I know we need to move forward. I do. For now, we are just back to living one day at a time.”

‘We are a normal working-class family who live by the rules of right and wrong’

‘It’s like the bottom has fallen out of my world again. I see this as the police’s carelessness’

Anne Sacoolas fled the UK after killing Harry Dunn, 19, above, in a road accident