Herald Reporter Chris Barton was in court last week to hear the inquest for schoolboy Toran Henry who committed suicide in 2008, aged 17 and provided this report:
Toran Henry. Photo / Supplied
Deb Williams settles into her back row seat of the Auckland Coroners Court and gets out the photos. She arranges them around her, a protective semi-circle on the ledge by the window, some stuck to the glass.
The photos speak of a beautiful daughter, Cloudy, full of life. She died on January 29, 2008, at just 20 years old.
There are photos of Toran Tiavare Henry full of life too. He died, aged 17, on March 20 the same year. As children Toran and Cloudy once played together.
Cloudy’s inquest has yet to happen. This is Toran’s. During the 18-day hearing, the photos on the wall are a stark reminder of tragic loss, of mothers’ grief, of young lives ended.
Coroner Murray Jamieson begins with statistics. Over the seven years from 2002 to 2008, an average of 150 citizens of greater Auckland – from Mangawhai to the Waikato River – have taken their lives each year.
The substantial increase in the Auckland adult population over the same period provides a small comfort – the rate of suicide in Auckland is declining. Teen suicides in Auckland average 14 a year.
Toran’s inquest is different from most, not just because it takes a marathon 18 days, but because what happens can be made public.
Normally inquests into suicide, while open to the public, are suppressed because the family requests that the information is kept private.
But in some suicides – such as Shane Fisher’s in Auckland and Brenda Moore’s in Waikato – the family overrides privacy in favour of accountability, the public’s right to know, and in the hope lessons may be learned.
Toran’s mother, Maria Bradshaw, has been speaking out more than most – making herself unpopular with Toran’s school, Takapuna Grammar, the Marinoto North Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service of the Waitemata District Health Board, and even the police.
“I believe that it takes a village to raise a child and I accept my very strong and real responsibility as a parent, but I feel very, very, let down by my community,” she tells the court.
The Coroners Court follows an inquisitorial process quite different from the adversarial system that pits the prosecution against the defence with a judge or jury deciding the outcome.
Evidence is given to the coroner then cross-examined by the other parties – in this case by barristers for the school, Marinoto, two psychiatrists and the police. (Contd NZ Herald …6 Feb 2010)
