A CORONER has appealed to parents not to fail their children, after a teenage girl got drunk in a park and then hanged herself from a lemon tree outside her family home — metres from where her mother and grandmother slept.
Coroner Athol Kennedy said the girl, who had just turned 15, died because she was a “lost child” and implored parents to supervise their children and set boundaries for them.
“I recommend that parents . . . ensure, as far as possible, that children go to bed, stay there, sleep, get up in the morning and go to school and go about ‘age-appropriate’ activities,” Mr Kennedy said in written findings, delivered in Mackay, in northeast Queensland, where the girl died on November 29, 2007.
“If parents and those others responsible for children do not do this then they fail their children.”
On the night she died, the girl had been “allowed” to drink alcohol until late in the night, with four other teenagers, Mr Kennedy found. “They were unsupervised and apparently no one cared where they were, who they were with or what they were doing.”
Mr Kennedy also noted that the “picture painted of the deceased is very sad”, and described her life situation in his findings.
The girl and her five siblings had “significant” involvement with the Department of Child Safety. Her oldest brother had a substance abuse problem, as did her mother and stepfather.
In a report supplied to the Coroner, the department admitted the girl’s whereabouts were often unknown, because she alternated between living with her stepfather, her mother and her grandmother.
In the two years before she died, three Child Safety Service Centres had direct involvement with the girl. But the department admits there was a “failure to engage” with the girl.
Some witnesses who gave evidence to the inquest said the girl had told them she had been raped by her cousin, two months before she died.
The cousin gave evidence to the inquest but said he and the girl had consensual sex about 10 times. The girl did not make a complaint to police about the alleged rape. On the night she died, the girl, her cousin and three other teens drank in a park near her home. At one point, the witnesses said, her cousin was “rapping” and called the girl a bitch.
She tried to hit him, but was tripped and fell to the ground. Later, she left the park. The next morning, the girl’s grandmother found her hanging from the lemon tree in the garden.
Forensic testing revealed that when she died, the girl had a blood alcohol reading of 0.107, twice the legal limit for driving.
Toluene and Xylenes — solvents found in spray-can paint — were detected in her blood.
In the findings, handed down in March, Mr Kennedy wrote that he could find no single reason why the girl died, but “ultimately she died because she was a ‘lost child”‘.
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