\n<\/p>\n
The inquest into the death of a 14-year-old boy, whose mother believes he died after a TikTok challenge gone wrong, is to be reopened in a landmark ruling by the high court.<\/p>\n
Jools Sweeney, a schoolboy from Gloucestershire, died in April 2022. His parents, Ellen Roome and Matt Sweeney, believed social media played a role in his death, pointing to the popularity of the \u201cblackout challenge\u201d online at the time.<\/p>\n
In their ruling, Lord Justice Warby and Mrs Justice Heather Williams ordered a fresh inquest into the schoolboy\u2019s death to allow for the examination of previously omitted social media evidence.<\/p>\n
Warby said it was \u201cnow clear there are various potential lines of inquiry\u201d that had not been considered in the original inquest.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor more than four years, we have fought every single day for the truth about what happened to our beautiful son Jools,\u201d said Roome, who wept in court as the judges read out their ruling. \u201cToday, the legal system has finally recognised that there are questions which deserve to be answered.\u201d<\/p>\n
The ruling is believed to be the first of its kind in England and Wales, in which one of the main grounds for overturning the previous inquest was the lack of social media evidence.<\/p>\n
The high court also overturned the findings of the original 2022 inquest, which lasted only 23 minutes and heard no oral evidence. The inquest also did not examine social media evidence, which was unavailable at that time.<\/p>\n
Roome later commissioned a private forensic analysis of Jools\u2019s phone, uncovering evidence not available to the original investigation. Her barrister, Harry Lambert, said evidence from Jools\u2019s TikTok data was \u201chighly probative of overuse or addiction\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis journey has broken us at times,\u201d said Roome. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Roome has also successfully campaigned for \u201cJools\u2019 law\u201d, which now requires tech companies to automatically preserve a child\u2019s online and social media data within five days of their death. This was written into the Crime and Policing Act on 29 April 2026.<\/p>\n
Anthony Jones, representing TikTok, said the company did not oppose Roome\u2019s proposal and \u201ccould certainly see the force\u201d for a new inquest.<\/p>\n
\u201cEllen\u2019s case has exposed just how much change is needed to ensure that parents like her have greater opportunities and a voice from the opening of the coronial inquiry,\u201d said Gary Miller, a partner at Mishcon de Reya, who instructed Lambert. \u201cSocial media is integrated into the lives of young people, and the current investigative processes are not fit for purpose in this new world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Roome, joined by four other bereaved British parents, is separately suing TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, in Delaware, US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The inquest into the death of a 14-year-old boy, whose mother believes he died after a TikTok challenge gone wrong, is to be reopened in a landmark ruling by the high court. Jools Sweeney, a schoolboy from Gloucestershire, died in April 2022. His parents, Ellen Roome and Matt Sweeney, believed social media played a role<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51204,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[25015,657,2866,662,376,9265,205,25014,204,544],"class_list":{"0":"post-51203","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-14yearold","9":"tag-blackout","10":"tag-boy","11":"tag-challenge","12":"tag-death","13":"tag-inquest","14":"tag-media","15":"tag-reopened","16":"tag-social","17":"tag-tiktok"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}