A “gentle” teenager died on Christmas Day 2020 just two days after being found unresponsive in his bedroom by his twin brother.
Owen Hughes, 16, looked like he was “asleep” when he was discovered at home on The Glen in Palacefields, Runcorn, on December 23 that year. An inquest held at Warrington Coroner’s Court on Friday heard how Owen’s family initiated determined CPR efforts and were soon joined by paramedics who assessed that Owen was in cardiac arrest.
They managed to restart his heart and Owen was taken to Warrington Hospital’s accident and emergency (A&E) department where he was stabilised and transferred to intensive care. Medics were unable to save him and he died on December 25 due to being deprived of oxygen by his initial collapse.
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His mother Cheryl told the inquest Owen had seemed “fine” when he went upstairs to play video games on December 23, 2020.
The family realised something was wrong when Owen’s twin brother went to let him know Cheryl was dishing out a chippy takeaway.
Owen’s brother found him on the floor unresponsive, and he alerted the family. CPR efforts began including from Owen’s grandfather John, and Owen’s sister rang 999.
Cheryl said she was “panicking” and thought it took an ambulance 15 minutes to arrive, aware that “every minute counts”.
The inquest heard a written statement from paramedic Ashley McComb, who received a call at 5.57pm and arrived at 6.09pm. Her North West Ambulance Service colleague Wesley Egan arrived soon after and as a team “commenced advanced life support”.
At the inquest, Owen’s father John asked why paramedics had not arrived sooner, given the Runcorn ambulance depot is “three minutes’ walk” from their house on The Glen.
Mr Egan said paramedics “rarely go back to the depot” once signed in, and instead work “job to job to job”, adding Ms McComb left another job to respond to Owen, whose case was set to the highest category of emergency call.
Cheryl Hughes told the inquest: “You can hear me on the call - ‘where’s the ambulance?’ It felt so long, every minute counts. They made an impact when they came. If they came five minutes earlier, we’re never going to know whether it would have made a difference.”
She said the combined efforts of family and paramedics “got a pulse”.
In her statement, Ms McComb said that when she arrived Owen’s grandfather John was providing “effective CPR”. She tried to fit a “Lucas device” CPR machine but Owen was too slim for it.
Owen was taken to hospital at 6.58pm, with sirens and lights activated for the journey, arriving at 7.16pm.
Dr Lisa Lang, also known as Jane, Warrington A&E consultant, said Owen arrived at A&E with a pulse of 106 beats per minute, but with low blood pressure and acidosis suggesting having suffered a shortage of oxygen.
After his admission, the family was initially interviewed by the police, for which Jean Harkin, assistant coroner for Cheshire, said the hospital has since “apologised”.
Dr Tim Furniss, intensive care consultant, told the inquest that after being stabilised in A&E, Owen was transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU), where a CT scan showed evidence of “hypoxic brain injury” and swelling, which he described as a “very bad sign”, which was further confirmed as “irreversible”.
Time of death was recorded as 5.01pm on Christmas Day.
A post-mortem examination was unable to find any obvious cause of death, and possible factors such as toxicology or infection were all ruled out.
Dr George Kokai, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital paediatric pathologist, now retired, told the hearing via videolink he had consulted with Salford Royal University Hospital neuro-pathologist Dr Daniel Du Plessis over Owen’s case for six months, concluding the reason for Owen’s collapse was either a seizure or heart arrhythmia.
He said Dr Du Plessis found “very subtle histological abnormalities in parts of the brain, which are rather subtle, but which may fulfil the diagnostic criteria of hippocampal malformation disease.”
Dr Kokai said international studies and papers suggested the issue was statistically linked to sudden death enough to be “more than just a coincidence.” He said this could result in a seizure, but cardiac arrhythmia also remained a possibility.
Ms Harkin recorded a combined conclusion that Owen died from “natural causes”, but with an added narrative and an “unascertained” cause of death due to the uncertainty over whether cardiac arrhythmia or a seizure was more likely, concluding it was “most likely due to central nervous system collapse”.
Discussing Owen’s time at Warrington Hospital in her concluding remarks, she said: “At that hospital he was given the best care possible. He was looked after first in accident and emergency, it’s a department that deals with the most dire conditions, and they stabilised him for him to go to intensive care and the intensive care team looked after him.
“Although it wasn’t a paediatric intensive care team it was a very experienced team who had the paediatric intensive care unit (at Alder Hey) to correspond with or communicate with if necessary.”
She added: “I hope that gives the parents some comfort that the very best was available to him and that may explain the hope that was given to the parents because the staff never gave up trying.
“We’ve heard the evidence of the paramedic and it’s the paramedic’s opinion that everything done by Ashley McComb was correct and there was nothing she could have done differently that could have had a different outcome.
“I accept that evidence. It gives us a lot of findings but still there’s uncertainty over the cause of death. It’s one of two.”
Ms Harkin thanked the paramedics and hospital for their “life-saving efforts”, and to the pathologists and Owen’s family for their contributions to the hearing.
The coroner and medical witnesses all expressed their condolences to Owen’s parents and grandfather John.
A fundraising appeal launched in his memory with the goal of “carrying on Owen's legacy and fulfilling as many of his wishes as possible” described him as “beloved son, brother, grandson, nephew and cousin”, “gentle”, and “the light of our lives” who “brought joy and life to any room he graced”, and who in addition to possessing “natural charm”, was “multi-talented with unlimited potential in anything he put his mind to”.
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