Schoolgirl, 14, found hanged after becoming upset when father confiscated her phone

A schoolgirl hanged herself after her father insisted she let him check her mobile phone for abusive messages, an inquest heard yesterday.
David Stringer said he found his daughter Jade, 14, hanging from a stairwell by a pink scarf when he went to look in on her about half an hour after she began ‘sulking’ in her bedroom.
He cut her down and she was taken to  hospital in a critical condition, but died six days later.

Tragic: Jade Stringer, 14, of Bury, Greater Manchester, was unhappy at being told to hand over the phone

The inquest heard that Jade’s parents, who are separated, had been worried she was receiving abusive text messages from a boy she had accused of hitting her.
Jade’s mother, Natalie Ingoe, 32, told the hearing that her daughter, who had done well at school, started wearing make-up and wanting to go out at night around the age of 12 or 13.
‘I suppose the normal teenage things,’ she added.
But in March 2011, Mr Stringer, 32, and Mrs Ingoe discovered that she was sleeping with a boyfriend and spoke to his parents to make sure they were never left unsupervised.
Then in November of that year Jade took an overdose of paracetamol and had to be kept in hospital overnight. ‘There was no indication why she did it – I thought at the time it was boys,’ said Mrs Ingoe.
The inquest in Rochdale was told  that Jade and her mother used  to share a mobile phone, and at Christmas that year she had allowed Mrs Ingoe to look at her text messages.
‘Some of them were from boys saying that she was going with lads,’ she said. ‘She just said it was lads making it up.’
Mrs Ingoe said friends of her daughter later told her ‘there were pictures going around of Jade’.
‘There had been a couple of incidents, and Jade had been at a party and had slept with someone and it had caused trouble with her boyfriend at the time,’ she added.

In attendance: Jade’s father David Stringer (left), 32, and mother Natalie Ingoe (right), 32, were at the inquest

But she said that when she and Mr Stringer talked to her about it, she ‘didn’t think there was anything wrong with it’.
Jade ran away from the home she shared with her father in Bury, Greater Manchester, on a couple of occasions but seemed more ‘settled’ in 2012, her mother added.
However, last summer she accused a boy of assaulting her, and her mobile phone was seized by police in an attempt to stop him contacting her.
Mr Stringer said that when it was returned last June, he and Jade’s mother told her that ‘she could have her phone back on the condition that we could check it to see that the lad hadn’t sent her any abusive messages’.
He added: ‘I asked her for the charger but she was in a sulk and said she didn’t want me to switch it on.
‘It was a stand-off and she was sulking in her bedroom. I left her to cool off and later went upstairs to see if she was still sulking, and that’s when I found her.’

Education: The teenager, who lived with her father at the time of her death, excelled as a Haslingden High School (pictured) pupil, performing as a cheerleader and as speaker for the school book club

Jade died at Manchester Children’s Hospital on June 16 with her family by her side.
Mr Stringer told the inquest  that until then he had regarded  his daughter as ‘behaving like a normal teenager’.
Recording a verdict of death by misadventure, assistant deputy coroner Lisa Hashmi said there had been no major cause for concern before the ‘disagreement’ over the mobile phone.
She said she could not be sure that Jade’s actions weren’t ‘simply another cry for help or call for attention’, and concluded: ‘I cannot be satisfied that she intended to take her own life.’

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