'Dismissed' torment that led to suicide
Updated on 18 September 2009
Police accused of ignoring the desperate pleas of a single mother being bullied by a gang of youths who's believed to have ended up killing herself and her disabled daughter. Darshna Soni reports.
An inquest into the deaths of Fiona Pilkington and her disabled 18-year-old daughter Francecca has been told the family home in Barwell was pelted with eggs, flour and stones, while Francecca was tormented because she had a severe learning disability.
Ms Pilkington had contacted police 21 times in seven years to complain about her ordeal but no one had ever been prosecuted.
Ms Pilkington and her daughter were found in the family's blazing Austin Maestro in a lay-by on the A47 just outside Earl Shilton, Leicestershire, in October 2007.
Chris Tew, the former assistant chief constable of Leicestershire Police admitted many of the calls to police were not linked together, and were not considered to be reporting crimes.
He told the court: "Anti-social behaviour often occurs in residential areas when no actual crime is being committed."
But the assistant deputy coroner Olivia Davison disputed this, saying: "It seems to me that, given the history and the context of the abuse, it would not have been anti-social behaviour but a crime because we had people being hounded in their own house."
In court, the coroner asked Mr Tew to list all of the incidents reported by Ms Pilkington during the nine months before she died.
In February 2007, she called the police because snowballs were thrown at the windows of their home, in March she reported people playing noisily outside and shouting abuse at her family and in April she reported that her son was being bullied.
The coroner said there were 13 incidents reported by Ms Pilkington in 2007 but the police did not always send somebody to respond.
Francecca's grandmother disputed the figures, claiming Ms Pilkington contacted the police many more times.
It was revealed in court that police often recorded Ms Pilkington's case as closed and once advised her to close her curtains so she could not see the people outside.
Giving evidence, Francecca's grandmother also said she did not think Ms Pilkington's complaints were taken seriously enough.
The coroner plans to investigate whether the case would have been dealt with better if Ms Pilkington's accusations of anti-social behaviour had been collected together. She also wants to discover if Ms Pilkington would have been given more support if the behaviour had been treated as investigated as hate crimes.
