Rhianan Rudd died of ‘self-inflicted act’ after facing charges but coroner says failures in her case were ‘not systemic’ A vulnerable teenage girl who died five months after terrorism charges against her were dropped was “highly affected” by her arrest but failures in her case were “not systemic”, a coroner has concluded. Rhianan Rudd died at a children’s home aged 16 in May 2022, as the result of a self-inflicted act, said the chief coroner of England and Wales, Alexia Durran. (…) It was not known what Rhianan was told by her legal team when the charges were dropped but this may have had a “psychological impact” on her, the coroner said. When Rhianan was arrested in October 2020, she was so small that no handcuffs would fit on her wrists. Aged 15, she became the youngest girl ever to be charged with terror offences in the UK after being groomed online by an American “neo-Nazi”. Less than 18 months later, she was found dead at the Bluebell House residential home in Nottinghamshire. Once a “bubbly, kind and loving” teenager, who loved animals and liked to bake, Rhianan had gradually become quiet and withdrawn. At first she told her mother that it was the coronavirus lockdown that had led to her change in behaviour, but in reality the teenager was being exploited. Rhianan remained under police investigation for more than two years before the charges were dropped, in light of evidence that she had been groomed and sexually exploited. Five months later, she took her own life in a children’s home. She had remained under investigation by MI5 until the day she died. Rhianan had been speaking online to Chris Cook, an Ohio-based 28-year-old far-right extremist. Cook, who was later convicted of being part of a terrorist plot, had messaged the then 14-year-old on WhatsApp, sending her links to “racially motivated, violent extremist books”. Evidence also showed she had been influenced by Dax Mallaburn, her mother Emily Carter’s former boyfriend, and a member of the Arizona Aryan Brotherhood, a neo-Nazi group. Carter knew her daughter had been radicalised; she had even referred her to the government’s de-radicalisation programme, Prevent, in September 2020, after Rhianan came downstairs and told her she had downloaded a bomb-making manual. “It was really scary. I knew it had to be done, but it doesn’t stop it being scary,” Carter said. “I was hoping that it was just going to take her two or three times a week to work on her mind, unpick her head, and turn her back into Rhianan, not end up with all these police officers turning up arresting her and pulling my house apart. You don’t expect that at all.” At the time of her arrest, Rhianan had a shrine to Adolf Hitler in her bedroom, and described herself as a fascist. She had sent messages on WhatsApp saying she “wants to kill someone in the school or blow up a Jewish place of worship” and she “does not care who she kills and nothing matters any more”. The inquest heard police had initially refrained from arresting the teenager as they thought to do so may “risk some impact on her mental health” and “could possibly lead to further self-harm and suicide attempts”. But in October 2020, a day after she had been treated in hospital after carving an image of a swastika into her forehead, 19 police officers and three detectives turned up at the family home in Bolsover, Derbyshire, to take her into custody.
via guardian: UK teenager who killed herself was ‘highly affected’ by terrorism arrest, inquest finds