THESE are the haunting final moments of a 14-year-old girl who took her own life in hospital after being left unsupervised by a staff member using a fake ID.
Ruth Szymankiewicz was being treated for an eating disorder at Huntercombe Hospital in Berkshire when the tragedy unfolded.
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She was supposed to be under constant supervision on the children’s psychiatric ward after being placed on “level three observation” due to earlier incidents of self-harm.
But CCTV footage from the hospital shows her last moments as she makes her from the lounge through the corridors of the ward completely unsupervised.
The teen can be seen in footage wrapped in a blanket as she walks to her room.
She passes other patients and some adults before heading for the open door of her bedroom.
Ruth walks in alone and unsupervised and shuts the door behind her before the video of her final movements ends.
The tragic teen later took her own life after she was able to shut herself in her bedroom at the hospital’s psychiatric intensive care unit, an inquest previously heard
Around a quarter of an hour passed before a nurse found Ruth and raised the alarm.
Ruth was raced to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where she sadly died two days later on February 14, 2022.
How to get help
EVERY 90 minutes in the UK a life is lost to suicide
It doesn’t discriminate, touching the lives of people in every corner of society – from the homeless and unemployed to builders and doctors, reality stars and footballers.
It’s the biggest killer of people under the age of 35, more deadly than cancer and car crashes.
And men are three times more likely to take their own life than women.
Yet it’s rarely spoken of, a taboo that threatens to continue its deadly rampage unless we all stop and take notice, now.
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The worker assigned to her supervision, a man then known as Ebo Acheampong, only had one and a half days of training and had faked his identity with false documents.
A police investigation found he was hired by the Platinum agency under a false name.
He never returned to the hospital following the incident and fled from the UK to Ghana.
Thames Valley Police previously said they knew the man’s real identity but do not have enough evidence to bring him back to the UK.
An inquest into Ruth’s tragic death returned a conclusion of unlawful killing.
Jurors, the coroner and members of the family could be seen crying as they returned their conclusion at Buckinghamshire Coroner’s Court.
CCTV shown at the inquest shows the moment Mr Acheampong left Ruth unsupervised while she sat in the ward’s lounge, enabling her to leave the room.
Ruth’s parents have now given an emotional interview, speaking out about the heartbreaking loss of their daughter.
Ruth’s father, Mark, told Sky News: “She went somewhere that was supposed to be helping her, and it made her worse.
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“The isolation and lack of access to her family had a massively negative impact.”
Her mother, Kate, added: “The children get lost. Ruth got lost. She was lost in the middle of all this chaos.”
The hospital’s strict visiting regime meant they were unable to see their daughter often.
Ruth’s dad, Mark, had never even seen his daughter’s room on the ward which was 70 miles away from their home in Wiltshire.
The family believe that if Ruth had been able to have regular contact with her parents she would still be alive.
Ruth was left isolated and her parents raised concerns that she was able to research suicide with unlimited access to her phone.
Her mum told the inquest Ruth was only allowed 20 minutes outside a day which she found “hard to believe” as “even prisoners get one hour.”
Kate went on to slam her daughter’s treatment on the ward as “terrible” and said her daughter just “wanted to make the world a better place.”
She told the inquest: “Our belief is that the things that Ruth had to endure on a daily basis would have felt like torture.”
Ruth’s parents said they felt they lost their parental rights and didn’t have a real say in her care.
Kate and Mark have called for families to be more involved to improve the quality of care in cases like Ruth’s.
If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Samaritans for free on 116123.
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