Picture a 14-year-old boy from Gloucestershire found unconscious in his bedroom one spring day in 2022. What followed was less an investigation than a formality: a 23-minute inquest, no live witnesses, a quick narrative verdict and everyone moves on. Until his mother decided that tidy little package would not do.
On 16 July the High Court, in the persons of Lord Justice Warby and Mrs Justice Heather Williams, agreed with her. They quashed the original conclusion and ordered a new inquest. This time the coroner will be allowed to examine previously unavailable evidence about social media, including whatever TikTok might still hold on the matter. Neither the coroner nor the platform bothered to oppose the application. One wonders why it took four years and a determined mother to reach this obvious point.
A campaign born of unbearable loss
Ellen Roome has spent more than four years fighting every single day for the truth about what happened to her beautiful son, Jools.
For more than four years we have fought every single day for the truth about what happened to our beautiful son, Jools. Today, the legal system has finally recognised that there are questions which deserve to be answered. This journey has broken us at times. It has taken an enormous emotional toll on our family, but we could never stop. We fought not only for Jools, but for every family who deserves to know the truth about how their child died because dangerous content was allowed to reach them.Her words land with the weary precision of someone who has replayed the nightmare on loop.
She cannot live the rest of her life without trying to find answers. That simple human insistence has now produced the first ruling of its kind in England and Wales: a fresh inquest that will scrutinise a dead child's social media data. Roome plans to use the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 to compel production of that material through the coroner. The Online Safety Act 2023, that much-trumpeted piece of legislation, was not even in force when Jools died. Another reminder that laws passed in Westminster often arrive too late for the families already shattered.
The blackout challenge and parental reality
Roome is also leading a wider campaign to ban social media for children under 16. In January 2025 she joined other parents in suing TikTok in the United States, alleging that her son and three other British teenagers died while attempting the so-called blackout challenge. The pattern is grimly familiar: impressionable youngsters chasing fleeting thrills dangled by algorithms that optimise for engagement rather than safety. Tech companies issue statements. Parents bury children. Rinse, repeat.
A TikTok spokesperson offered the standard corporate piety:
