A 13-year-old schoolgirl was found hanged at her home with “I hate my brother” written on her arm after the pair argued because she didn’t wake him for work, a coroner’s inquest heard.
Bethany Fitton, from Hebden Bridge, a small town 200 miles north of London, was found by her 18-year-old brother, Ben, who desperately tried to save her before she died in the hospital.
An inquest was told that the pair had an argument in June last year after Ben slept in and Bethany failed to wake him for work.
At school that day, she doodled on her left arm in ink “I hate my brother.”
Bradford Coroner’s Court heard she regularly scribbled on herself. Coroner’s inquests are convened when the cause of death is unknown. In such circumstances, a jury is presented evidence to determine who died, where they died, when they died and how they died.
After her final class, Bethany went to meet her new boyfriend and the pair went for a walk in a local park before she caught the bus home.
Her mom, Estelle Fitton, had her tea waiting for her shortly after 6 p.m. and she took the meal upstairs to her room, where she started playing music.
Fitton said her daughter was social media-mad — using Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Kick — even moving her mattress into the spare room to be closer to the Wi-Fi router.
Estelle recounted that her husband, Richard, was at work and Ben had gone to the movies with his girlfriend.
The inquest heard that when Ben returned home about 7:30 p.m., he was given a basket of laundry to take upstairs by his mom.
The teenager had to go through Bethany’s bedroom to get to the staircase that leads to his room and found his sister hanging.
Ben began giving her CPR while paramedics rushed to the scene and Bethany was taken to Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, before being transferred to Leeds General Infirmary, the largest hospital in the area.
Despite desperate attempts to save her life, Bethany’s brain had been starved of oxygen and she died three days later on June 25.
Ben told police they would regularly squabble about “silly little things” and said the argument that morning had been a 4 on a scale of 10.
He said: “I knew she had written something but I was not aware of what she had written.”
“She often used to scribble things on her arm, like pictures or notes.”
Estelle said in a statement read to the court that she had walked their family dogs with Bethany the previous evening and her daughter was happy, doing cartwheels and handstands as they chatted.
They had talked about how Bethany now spent more time in her room than she used to, and she’d answered: “Mom, I’m a teenager.”
She described Bethany as a “reliable and capable” girl with a lot of common sense.
Richard Fitton said his daughter had loved pony riding as a youngster and still slept with a comfort blanket despite beginning to fuss over hair and makeup like any normal teenage girl.
Richard said: “I cannot understand why Beth has done this. This is the last thing I ever expected to happen — it was out of the blue.”
Bethany’s school record showed she was “good” and “outstanding” in many subjects.
Her doctor told the inquest she was making that difficult transition between being a child and being an adult.
Pediatric pathologist Dr. Marta Cohen carried out a post-mortem and found Bethany suffered a heart attack due to hanging, causing hypoxia to the brain.
Assistant Coroner Peter Merchant said that although Bethany had hanged herself, she left no suicide note and he could not be satisfied she intended to take her own life.
He said that despite that morning’s argument and the message on her arm, Bethany and Ben were normal siblings.
Merchant said: “There is simply no explanation given to why Bethany would do what she did on that day.”
The coroner recorded an open verdict.