Mother wins High Court bid to reopen son's death in online challenge case

Ellen Roome won a High Court bid to reopen the inquest into her 14-year-old son Jools Sweeney’s death, after the original hearing lasted just 23 minutes and its conclusion was later quashed. Roome believes the Cheltenham boy died in April 2022 after an online challenge went wrong, and she has spent more than four years pressing for answers.

Roome has said she was blocked from accessing Jools’s social media data without a court order, leaving her to fight through the legal system for material she believes could explain how her son died. Police have retained Jools’s phone data, and Roome hopes it will now be examined for clues that were never fully considered at the first inquest.

The case has become a test of how coroners handle possible online-harm deaths, where digital records can be as important as witness statements or medical evidence. When an inquest is concluded in minutes, campaigners argue, families can be left without any meaningful scrutiny of phone messages, app activity or platform records that may hold the only clear trail of events.

Roome’s campaign has also pushed the issue well beyond one family. Through Jools’ Law, she backed a UK reform calling for a child’s online and social media data to be preserved automatically within five days of death, so parents are not forced to win court orders before evidence disappears. The campaign said that change was achieved on 29 April 2026, turning a private fight over Jools’s death into a national demand for faster preservation rules and clearer accountability from both coroners and social media companies.

Roome has said, “I will keep going until I find the truth about what happened to my son and make sure no other parent has to fight this hard for answers.” The reopening of the inquest gives her another chance to press that case, and to ask why the first hearing moved so quickly when the possible role of digital evidence had never been properly resolved.