Overview
- Coroner Crispin Oliver concluded on October 21 after a three-day hearing that 18-year-old Sam Coutts took his own life and that those around him had no clear warning of suicidal intent.
- On January 13 Sam attended a meeting at Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College about anonymous Reddit posts in which he wrote about a crush on his support worker and referenced taking oxytocin, and CCTV showed he went straight from that meeting to the college toilets where he was found unresponsive about three hours later.
- The support worker, Lauren Crosby, told the inquest she discovered Sam’s Reddit posts and reported them, and college safeguarding staff said they decided to move him to a different support worker because the posts raised ‘significant concerns.’
- The inquest heard that Sam was a high-functioning autistic A‑level student who masked his autism, found change distressing, left a note and kept a journal that family had not seen, and that those private entries helped explain hidden risk the coroner described as ‘like an iceberg.’
- After the first day of hearings the college received an anonymous threatening email, police were notified, staff were briefed and permitted to give evidence remotely, and the coroner’s findings are likely to prompt scrutiny of the college’s safeguarding procedures.