My son died a hero... but it’s a cop-out to say he didn’t kill himself
Father of Harry’s tragic pal slams coroner who ruled out suicide verdict
THE father of a soldier who served with Prince Harry in Afghanistan has criticised a coroner for failing to rule that his son’s death was suicide.
Derek Hunt, 66, who spearheaded The Mail on Sunday’s campaign for a 24-hour helpline for soldiers with mental health problems, accused coroner Paul Smith of ‘sweeping the issue under the carpet’.
His son, Warrant Officer Nathan Hunt, 39, was found with a ligature around his neck at his home in Lincoln on January 2, having shown signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
At an inquest last week, Mr Smith recorded a narrative verdict, saying that WO Hunt, who was in the Royal Engineers, had died ‘as a consequence of hanging’ but there was insufficient evidence to rule that he had deliberately killed himself.
But WO Hunt’s father described the verdict as ‘a cop-out’ and said he had wanted his son’s death registered as a suicide to help highlight the issue of soldiers and veterans taking their own lives.
‘I believed all the evidence was there to suggest his death was a suicide whichever way you look at it, but it seems that it wasn’t in the eyes of the law,’ he said.
‘Instead, the coroner came back with a wishy-washy narrative verdict that did not record that conclusion. It was probably down to the absence of a suicide note.
‘But it is really just a cop-out and is just sweeping the issue under the carpet. It didn’t address that he had PTSD, even though there was evidence that he did. I was very disappointed in it. If he had come back with a verdict of suicide due to PTSD, it might have made the Ministry of Defence sit up and take more notice.’
Prince Harry served with WO Hunt in Helmand province in 2008 and sent a private letter of condolence to his comrade’s parents after his death. Coroners require a high degree of proof to record deaths as suicide and have increasingly been using narrative verdicts in recent years. Campaigners suspect coroners also want to spare anguish for the families of the deceased.
But Mr Hunt said: ‘I can understand this if it was an inquest into the death of a civilian but this was not the case with Nathan.
‘He was a soldier and we accept that he decided to take his own life due to all the pressures he was under.’
A spokeswoman for the Lincolnshire coroner’s office said: ‘The full reasons for the conclusion were given in open court by the coroner.’
A new helpline funded by the Ministry of Defence after The Mail on Sunday’s campaign has received hundreds of calls since February.